Nations move fossil fuel debate from pledges to strategies in Colombia

The world’s first conference on phasing out fossil fuels has ended in Colombia with delegates from 56 countries declaring that the global debate has shifted from whether to stop using oil, gas and coal to how to do it. Debt and financing remain major obstacles.


Issued on: 30/04/2026 - 

An oil refinery in El Dorado, Kansas. Fossil fuels remained at the centre of global climate talks in Colombia as countries debated how to move away from oil, gas and coal. 

© AP - Charlie Riedel


Participants gathered for several days in Santa Marta, a coal port on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, for talks focused directly on winding down fossil fuel production rather than only cutting emissions.

While the meeting produced no binding commitments by the time it wrapped up on Wednesday, it launched working groups on financing and labour transitions, plans for continued cooperation and momentum toward future negotiations.

"Cops are more formal, negotiators have their lines and they will not cross them – it’s so different here," said former Irish president Mary Robinson, now a climate justice advocate, referring to UN climate conferences.

Participants "have felt more human together", she said.

Debt and limited resources were among the biggest barriers for developing countries.

"Many of them are in bad need of debt relief to even begin a transition," Robinson told the conference. Those countries are "trapped in debt".

Colombia conference aims for 'more honest conversation' to speed fossil fuel exit

Who pays?

Financing emerged as the biggest immediate challenge, with developing countries facing high borrowing costs and limited access to money.

"The financing is key, this is an investment issue," said Nick Robins, senior director for finance and private sector at the World Resources Institute.

Debt pressure is also pushing some countries deeper into fossil fuel expansion.

"What we’re hearing is that they would like to stop expanding fossil fuel production, but they’re being forced into new oil and gas and coal projects just to feed their debt," said Tzeporah Berman, founder and chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.

"This conference is actually the first time in 30 years of climate negotiations where countries are gathering to talk about how to ensure a fossil fuel phase-out."

The financing challenge was also central to talks ahead of last year's Cop30 in Brazil, where fiscal pressures were repeatedly raised as a major obstacle.

"We need for finance ministers to help us on finding solutions on how to deal with the fiscal challenges of transition," Ana Toni, Cop30 chief executive, told the conference.

Roadmaps and bans

France drew attention on the conference’s opening day by publishing what it called a roadmap to eliminate fossil fuel use for energy by 2050, though some participants noted it largely repackaged existing pledges.

A new Scientific Panel for the Global Energy Transition was also launched to help governments, cities and regions design pathways away from fossil fuels.

"It will provide all the solutions – to implement them, and to finance them," Brazilian climate scientist Carlos Nobre told the French news agency AFP.

Colombia banned fossil fuel and mineral extraction in its Amazon region last year "to stop the expansion of the extractive frontier", said Colombia’s Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres.

Tuvalu, one of the countries most threatened by rising sea levels, will host the next conference in 2027 with Ireland as co-host.

"If we are to address the climate change issue, we have to address the root cause, and the root cause is the fossil fuel industry," Tuvalu Climate Minister Maina Talia told the Associated Press.

"We don’t want just a free and flexible outcome. We want something concrete. We want steps, solutions on the table."

(with newswires)

The Minilateralist Incentive: A Climate Change Conference in Colombia

By Binoy Kampmark

April 28, 2026

Source: Counterpunch

Image: Logo for the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels – Fair Use

Not much good comes from war.  Qualifying exceptions, however, can be found. The United Nations, tarnished, libelled and mocked for being simultaneously ineffectual and intrusive, was the mediating entity for international relations that grew from the calamities of the Second World War.  Without that somewhat frail body, it is hard to imagine how the patchwork of human rights, however uneven, could have been stitched.  The Iran War, and the consequential choking of the Strait of Hormuz by Tehran and Washington respectively have also had an unintended, meliorating effect.  If the pressing dangers of climate change cannot push fossil fuel exporters and consumers to wean themselves off their diet of extraction and carbon emission, the panic caused by economic shock may well do the trick.

Despite the pageantry that circles around the now familiar Conferences of the Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), progress on limiting the rise of global temperature remains tardy and constipated.  The annual COP talks have become ceremonies of fatigue and inanition, often influenced by petrostates and avid fossil fuel lobbyists.  The COP30 talks held in Brazil last November typified the mood.  The final COP 30 agreement, entitled “Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change”, failed to even mention the role of fossil fuels.  (The same can be said of the 2015 Paris Agreement.)  Fossil fuels – that devil in the detail – only debuts in the 2023 COP28 conference, with the call to transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science”.

The insipid outcome of COP30 was enough to spur Colombia and the Netherlands to announce their co-hosting of the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, a step as part of the Belém Declaration on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels.  “This will be,” explained  Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, “a broad intergovernmental, multisectoral platform complementary to the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] designed to identify legal, economic, and social pathways that are necessary to make the phasing out of fossil fuels.”

The talks that began on April 24 at the coastal town of Santa Marta, Colombia, are the genesis of that promise.  While the list of attendees has conspicuous omissions – the United States, China and India are not among their number – a number of prominent fossil fuel states are.  Such absentees as the US did not trouble Torres.  “We knew they weren’t going to be here.  We weren’t expecting them to be here because their energy policy and their economic policy is to ‘drill, baby, drill.’”  Not only would the conference not be for them, Torres could express her relief that no one would be “boycotting” the endeavour.

Among the 60 states, we find Australia, Canada and Nigeria.  Likewise Brazil, the United Kingdom and the European Union.  Countries heavily dependent on such commodities – Pakistan and the Philippines, for instance – are also on the list of participants.

The format of the conference purposely departs from the clumsy, ungainly model of the COP talks.  The gathering is smaller and winnowed of any potential saboteurs and fossil fuel touters. It  comprises an academic conference, a people’s summit and two days of more formal engagements between government officials.  Individuals from the private sector have also been invited, but only those sympathetic to the conference’s principles and aims.

The eventual report produced by the co-hosts will take into account discussions and deliberations  premised on three pillars.  The first deals with economic dependence on fossil fuels, a particularly critical matter for poorer states unable or challenged in achieving an energy transition.  The second focuses on how best to deal with the supply and demand of fossil fuels, a problem aggravated by the current energy crisis.  The third pillar is built around “international cooperation and climate diplomacy” which can cover such matters as the problematic investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system.  ISDS has offered much security and succour to fossil fuel companies keen to protect their investments against the perceived predations of climate change policies.

Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s climate commissioner, explained the importance of the gathering to Politico: “It is hugely important that the Colombians and the Dutch and others have set this up, because we all see how wrecked the COP process is, how vulnerable it is to naysayers and those who want to derail it.”  The unifying theme here was “the need to find an alternative.   And if anything, world events of the last six weeks have proven them right.”

The scientists are sticking, understandably, to the message of environmental danger.   “Breaking through 1.5°C means we enter a far more dangerous world – with more frequent and intense droughts, floods, fires and heatwaves – and we are already approaching critical tipping points in major Earth systems,” says the consistently gloomy Johan Rockströmm, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change.  But the energy supply crisis produced by the Iran War may well reinvigorate what seemed to be an expiring patient.

This article was originally published by Counterpunch; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Binoy Kampmark

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Brazil’s Cooperatives Show How Local Communities Can Drive the Climate Transition

By Bernard Marszalek

May 3, 2026

Source: Grassroots Economic Organizing

Image Credit: Xuthoria, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. “From the Amazon to the world: End of inequality and environmental racism, climate justice yes!”

The UN declared 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives. The theme of the year—”Cooperatives Build a Better World”—provided a splendid opportunity for the worldwide cooperative movement to mark its existence as vital to building a better world by limiting the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, that didn’t occur. To be more precise, it didn’t occur with the bureaucrats associated with various top-heavy international organizations that represent the cooperative economic sector on the world stage.

However, the Organization of Brazilian Cooperatives (OCB) did take a stand to support the UN Climate Summit, COP30, held in Belem, Brazil on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. The OCB issued a Manifesto outlining their many projects that support a truly sustainable society.

The main opposition to the International Fossil Fuel Lobby comes from nations that are the least responsible for the devastation caused by a warming planet. These nations for the most part are powerless to oppose the insanity of that Lobby. What is notable about the cooperative Manifesto is that it comes from Brazil, a country that the World Bank lists as the 10th-largest economy in the world. And not surprisingly, according to 2024 data, Brazil ranks 9th in daily oil production.

More importantly, Brazil ranks 6th among countries emitting GHGs, accounting for 2.5% of total worldwide emissions, right behind Russia, which emits 5%. With a population of nearly 216,000,000, Brazil must be recognized as an economic and political power. Likewise, the cooperative sector in Brazil is a significant force in Brazilian society. The latest figures indicate that there are 6,828 cooperatives in the country with 425,318 worker-members. The majority of co-ops are in the agricultural sector. However, if we include cooperative housing, food co-ops, and over 750 credit unions with 9 million members, the total membership in cooperatives rises to over 14 million.

The OCB’s credit union network and its staff of 45,000 combat the effects of climate change by supporting ecological land initiatives such as agricultural restoration and exploring biofuel ventures; they also promote waste management and alternative energy projects.

As we see, the Brazilian cooperative sector is a major economic force, and its Manifesto advances four radical governing principles. The First Principle: the natural economy of photosynthesis has both social and economic value, most apparent in the tropical belt, where rural communities attempt to protect forests and practice eco-friendly agriculture.

The Second: paradoxically, climate serves as a driver of development by promoting innovation. In Brazil, for example, agricultural waste is used to produce bioenergy in the form of ethanol and biodiesel. Where electrical infrastructure doesn’t exist, biofuels function as an expedient alternative to fossil fuels.

The Third Principle: this principle seems most obvious, but unfortunately, it isn’t—communities need to be the focus for action. Funding must directly reach and support local actions to promote economic incentives. A top-down system of financial allocations won’t motivate participation as much as one based on local control of funds.

Most importantly, Principle Four states unambiguously that cooperatives are the means to achieve climate change goals. Why? Cooperatives have an ethical foundation for social inclusion, democratic social organization, and territorial development in the communities where they operate. As the Manifesto states:

Their widespread presence and the reach of their assistance networks promote funding for local initiatives and the implementation of sustainable practices in agriculture, renewable energy, waste management, and conservation.

The Manifesto explores in depth five main points of the cooperative’s Green Program: food security, technology and low-carbon agriculture; the valorization of communities and climate funding; energy transition and sustainable development; bioeconomy as a driver of development; and adaptation and mitigation of climate risks. To review their significance, these areas will be briefly elaborated below.

1. Food security, technology and low-carbon agriculture

With more than 1 million member producers, 71% of whom are family farmers, cooperatives are key players in supplying more than 53% of the national grain harvest to Brazilians.

OCB supports 9,000 technicians (a role similar to the US County Extension Agent system) working with the cooperatives. One benefit of this assistance is the reduction of the agricultural carbon footprint. The cooperative farms reclaim degraded pastures, adopt sustainable soil management, handle agro-industrial waste in sound ways, conserve environmental assets, and foster bioeconomic initiatives. The Brazilian cooperative model can serve as a benchmark for countries where agriculture is a major sector by demonstrating how to combine productive growth, technological innovation, and respect for the environment.

2. OCB climate funding

Brazil’s credit unions are present in more than half of Brazil’s municipalities, offering financial services to about 1.5 million people. This extensive network provides access to credit for small producers and entrepreneurs who would otherwise find it difficult to acquire financial support.

Furthermore, credit unions are receptive to green projects because they are rooted in their communities, which means they are best positioned to assess the risks of sustainable projects. If a project is viable, they can leverage both public and private funding for otherwise abandoned green endeavors. Credit unions, in this way, recirculate money back into their communities and do not, like private finance, extract local wealth.

3. Energy transition and sustainable development

It is notable that the Manifesto discusses the energy transition as one of the most urgent challenges of global climate governance. In 2023, 736 Brazilian cooperatives generated their own energy, a significant increase compared to 2022, when 582 cooperatives generated part of their energy. The highlight for 2023 was solar installations with 3,523 projects.

During COP30, Brazil’s cooperative sector led the debate on the energy transition in a just, orderly, and equitable manner. It was expected that a UN-sponsored roadmap to a planned transition away from fossil fuels would be finalized. It failed. The delegates succumbed to the fossil fuel lobby. What was agreed upon was a voluntary roadmap endorsed by a majority of the delegations.

4. Bioeconomy as a development driver

The Manifesto promotes regenerative agriculture in Brazil not as a mitigation measure, as we find in much of the US discussion of the topic, but as a driver of the bioeconomy, incorporating biofertilizers and biopesticides.

In the Amazon, a range of products can be grown sustainably, that is, in balance with the environment: acai, Brazil nuts, and rubber. Besides native products like babassu oil, which has properties similar to those of coconut oil, and cupuaçu. The pulp of the cupuaçu fruit is used to make ice creams, snack bars, and other products.

The Manifesto advocates for federal funding to prevent land grabbing, deforestation, and organized crime related to drug processing. More importantly, funding is needed to encourage a cooperative bioeconomy that values the diversity of Brazilian biomes. Funding in this manner strengthens the role of agricultural cooperatives to link up with the rest of the cooperative economy to generate employment and income and prevent illegal activities.

5. Adaptation and mitigation of climate risks

The last section of the Manifesto is devoted to an aspect of the climate catastrophe that is missing in environmental narratives in the developed world—adaptation. 94 percent of Brazilian municipalities have been affected by natural disasters in recent decades, directly affecting millions of people.

In this context, cooperatives are an instrument of sustainability and resilience. With their wide reach and operations in strategic sectors such as agriculture, infrastructure and credit, cooperatives have the potential to develop local, scalable responses to climate change. The capacity of cooperatives to lead climate mitigation and adaptation processes is evident in initiatives aimed at the recovery of infrastructure. Cooperatives have also adopted sustainable production systems and developed innovative techniques to deal with extreme weather events.

The primary importance of the cooperative sector in Brazil and elsewhere, where cooperatives are established, lies in their effective embedding in communities. This inherent decentralization encourages local participation in resilience and adaptation projects. The Brazilian cooperatives have initiated, among other things, watershed restoration, massive tree planting, stockpiles of supplies for crisis situations, and have built ecological corridors for wildlife to encourage the occupation of larger ranges.

Indigenous populations, due to the practice of localism, participate in the cooperative movement. For example, the Foresters and Reforesters Work Cooperative of the Pataxó Boca da Mata Indigenous village (Cooplanjé) in Bahia has reforested 210 hectares of Atlantic Rainforest in the Monte Pascoal-Pau Brasil Ecological Corridor.

While the Manifesto was not an official state document, it nevertheless has the heft of a large oppositional movement to capitalist orthodoxy. And further, it’s a movement that has an established economic presence “on the ground,” as journalists like to say.

The Manifesto deserves world recognition not as a statement of hope, of possibility, but, significantly, of strategy.

Its importance, as far as I can determine, has been ignored by the worldwide bureaucratic, cooperative establishment. In fact, one could say that the Manifesto is an embarrassment to that establishment, which has simply mouthed inanities about “sustainable development” which come directly from corporate press releases.

The question about its importance is derived from several points that are highlighted in the Manifesto. First and foremost, the Brazilian cooperative movement is a “Green Movement” incorporating an established and enduring infrastructure of varied economic institutions from a large agricultural sector to an extensive financial network and a varied complement of technical assistance entities. These institutions work together to achieve eco-friendly goals.

The network of cooperatives makes possible plans to mitigate both man-made and natural impediments to sustainable goals. The collaboration of these networked cooperative institutions provides the means to forge adaptations to an environment devastated by climate change. Agricultural seed research, for instance, works to find crops best suited for drought conditions.

The Brazilian Manifesto may be more relevant to countries in the South, where agriculture is a significant economic driver, than to the overdeveloped economies of the North. In any case, the Brazilian cooperative economy isn’t necessarily a model to be replicated. We should see it as a guide to what is possible when cooperative institutions are present in significant numbers and where they search for a post-capitalist response to environmental degradation and resource depletion.

In the US, with both agricultural cooperatives and co-op utilities covering rural America, there exists an infrastructure that could be mobilized to contend with climate change. Already, in a modest way, co-op utilities supply a grid to farms that support local solar and wind generation. If we add in local credit unions that can provide loans to purchase renewable energy sources, then that already in place network of cooperatives can realize a major advance beyond the use of fossil fuels.

The US, unlike Brazil, has many housing cooperatives, from smaller multi-unit residential buildings of the sort found in many college towns, to huge estates like those in New York City. And as with the farming communities, these buildings could be fitted with solar panels purchased with the help of a local credit union. These endeavors could be expanded to forest restoration of the sort practiced for over ten years in the Northwest by the Hoedads in the 1980s. There is a need to catalyze these eco-friendly projects, and fortunately, we have a model in a two-decade-old Canadian research cooperative, Sustainability Solutions Group (SSG). With a staff of 30, it provides a range of services for governments, communities, and other cooperatives. UK’s Coop News reports:

SSG… helps decision-makers confront the climate crisis by providing services that span greenhouse gas inventories, carbon budgeting, climate mitigation and adaptation planning, scenario modelling and implementation support.

The catalyst in this case, SSG, is a worker cooperative enterprise that could be replicated, as in Brazil’s OCB, with 9,000 technicians to aid farmers. The beauty of a decentralized project is that it relies on cooperative institutions already in place across the country. All we need is to convince the siloed cooperative sectors to collaborate on projects to address the socio-economic-cultural catastrophe we have entered.

This article was originally published by Grassroots Economic Organizing; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

Founding Felons: Jefferson Would Be on a Watch List Today—You Might Be Next 

John W. Whitehead – Nisha Whitehead

 May 1, 2026

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Image Source: American Statesman

Everything this nation once stood for is being turned on its head.

We are being asked—no, told—to believe that the greatest threat to America today is not government overreach, endless war, corruption, surveillance, or the steady erosion of constitutional rights.

No, the real threat, it seems, is speech.

Dangerous speech. Hateful speech. Critical speech. Speech that dares to challenge power.

In the wake of the reported assassination attempt on President Trump, the Trump administration has wasted no time advancing a dangerous narrative: that criticism of the president—especially criticism labeling him authoritarian or fascist—is not just wrong, but responsible for violence.

The implication is as chilling as it is unconstitutional: if you criticize the government too harshly, you may be to blame for what happens next.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the government’s argument is this: criticism fuels anger, and anger leads to violence against the Trump administration.

Which means the solution, in the government’s eyes, is simple: silence the criticism—but only when it is leveled at the Trump administration.

When White House officials suggest that calling a president a fascist may constitute libel or slander, they are not merely defending reputations—they are laying the groundwork for criminalizing dissent.

This is how it begins.

This is how republics become regimes.

First, criticism is labeled dangerous. Then it is labeled harmful. Then it is labeled illegal. And before long, it is gone.

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech—especially when the justification is “safety.” Because every time the government claims it must limit freedom to protect the public, what it is really doing is expanding its own power.

The irony is almost too glaring to ignore.

By the standards now being floated by those in power, America’s founders themselves would be considered extremists.

Seditionists. Radicals. Domestic threats.

Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been placed on an anti-government watch list for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

By today’s standards, these are not the words of patriots.

They are the words of people who would be surveilled, flagged, censored—and likely arrested.

Had the government of their day succeeded in suppressing their “dangerous speech,” there would have been no Revolution. No Declaration of Independence. No Constitution. No Bill of Rights.

You see, the right to criticize the government is not a side issue.

It is the foundation of a free society. And yet, that foundation is already cracking.

More and more, any speech that challenges authority—exposes corruption, questions policy, or calls out abuses of power—is being recast as dangerous, extremist, or even violent.

The categories keep expanding: Hate speech. Misinformation. Disinformation. Conspiratorial speech. Radical speech. Anti-government speech.

Different labels, same goal: control the narrative.

What has changed is not the tactic—it’s the target.

Under the previous administration, “dangerous speech” meant election denial, COVID dissent, and those who challenged official narratives about public health and national security.

Now, under the Trump administration, “dangerous speech” means media outlets that report unfavorably on the government, comedians who mock those in power, and citizens who dare to call authoritarianism by its name.

The script keeps flipping depending on who is in power, but the ending never changes: censorship.

The message is unmistakable: criticize the wrong people, and your livelihood may be next—not because you committed a crime, but because your words were treated as one.

The latest example: the Trump administration is once again targeting former FBI director James Comey—this time for posting a photo of seashells spelling out “8647,” a slang expression of opposition to Trump, the nation’s 47^th president.

A social media post. Treated like a threat.

This is how dissent is being redefined—not as a constitutional right but as a threat.

Yet while the government wrings its hands over so-called dangerous rhetoric, it continues to wield—and expand—its own machinery of violence.

Criticism is being treated as a threat to public safety, while the police state openly embraces more brutal forms of punishment, soon in the form of execution by firing squads.

History makes one thing clear: governments do not fear violence nearly as much as they fear dissent. That is why the first target of any regime drifting toward authoritarianism is not the gun. It is the voice.

As George Orwell warned, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

If we allow the government to decide which words are too dangerous to be spoken, it won’t be long before we discover that the most dangerous words of all are the ones that speak truth to power.

We are further down that road than most Americans realize.

This is the part of the story Americans should recognize.

First, the government tells you certain speech is dangerous. Then it tells you those who engage in it are dangerous. Then it tells you those people must be monitored, silenced, and, eventually, punished. And all the while, it wraps these measures in the language of safety, unity, and national security.

This is not new. It is as old as tyranny itself.

As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the road to authoritarianism is paved with small compromises—especially when it comes to speech, dissent, and the willingness of the citizenry to push back.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

For those who still believe in exercising their First Amendment rights, the risks are becoming harder to ignore.

With every passing day, the line between a free society and a controlled one is being erased—replaced by a system where speech is monitored, dissent is punished, and truth itself is treated as a threat.

And once that happens, freedom doesn’t just fade—it dies, one silenced voice at a time.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books The Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield America: The War on the American People are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.