How this climate conference secured a breakthrough

0:00 Last week, an historic climate conference concluded and you need to know about it. In this video, we're going to talk about what this conference was, how we got here, what was agreed at the conference, and what's going to happen next. And this is an unusual video for me because I've not got a fully worked out script. I've just got a research document in front of me. I've basically pulled together all the resources I could find as quickly as possible after the conference finished so we can get this video to you. So, it's a bit of a lottery about how much sense it's going to make. This is Santa Martr, a beautiful looking city in Colombia. And I've regrettably yet to go. I didn't go to this conference, but it was the home of the first international conference on the phase out of fossil fuels. Now, you may well say, "I thought that was what COP was." Well, not exactly. COP which stands for

0:46 conference of the parties is the United Nations conference series on how we limit the impact of climate change which in practical terms means bringing down our greenhouse gas emissions and we just had the 30th iteration of this which was in BM in Brazil and to say it's had a potted history would be generous. The first one happened back in 1995 in Berlin and it took two more conferences for the actual first significant agreement to happen on the needs to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. That happened in 1997 in Kyoto. It was the Kyoto agreement which introduced this idea of shared but differentiated responsibilities. This idea that everybody needs to bring down their greenhouse gas emissions. some countries are in a better position to do so now which was great big deal but it kind of was the only big deal to come out of COP

1:32 until 2015 because at COP 21 we got the Paris agreement and after the year 2020 an agreement for how the world should be phasing out its fossil fuels and that has been really quite effective in the 10 years before the Paris agreement year global emissions grew on average by 1.7% and in the 10 years after the Paris agreement they did continue to rise but by 0% 32% year on year. The Paris agreement was quite a clear demarcation. However, that's obviously not good enough. We don't need emissions to plateau. We need them to fall. And at subsequent COPs, not very much added to the Paris agreement. Uh at COP 26 in Glasgow, we had some progress being made. For the first time, the phase down of coal was

2:18 mentioned in the final text. And then at COP 28 in Dubai of all places, the phase out of fossil fuels was mentioned in the final text for the first time. And that final text is the key point here. It is the strength and the weakness of the COP format. The final text is the document that gets released at the end of the conference that everybody at the conference agreed to everything in. And that's a really powerful document because everybody after the fact can point to every bullet point and say we all agreed on this. So, you know, we got to do something powerful but limited. Because while the vast majority of countries around the world know that climate change is real, already feeling its effects, and wants to phase out fossil fuels to bring down our greenhouse gas emissions, a small number of countries vastly benefit from their sale. Of course, I'm talking about Saudi

3:04 Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, but also countries like China. And it just takes one of those countries to say in negotiations, "No, we're not happy with that bullet point. please change it for progress to come to a grinding halt. And that's basically what's happened over the past 30 years of cops. What's called the consensus mechanism has been its greatest strength, but also its Achilles heel. And this came to a head at COP 30 in Berm where a couple of countries were really frustrated by this and said, "Right, we're going to do our own conference to do things better." And at the end of that conference, Colombia and the Netherlands said they would be co-hosting the first international phase out conference and they'd be inviting a coalition of the willing. That conference of course became Santa Marta and it was not about should we phase out

3:49 fossil fuels. It was how are we going to phase out fossil fuels and at the time of recording they haven't released the full outcomes from the conference. They have released a preliminary bunch of outcomes and in that they specify that the aim was not to develop new targets but how to advance and accelerate the implementation of agreed goals and the conference was broken down into a scientific pre-conference where scientists around the world met and basically came up with a bunch of recommendations. I'll talk about them a little bit later. Then there was a day for subnational governments and other stakeholders and then two days for the big wigs, the climate envoys, the environment ministers, that kind of thing. And it was attended by 56 countries with additional representation from the EU which represent over half of the world's GDP and almost a third of its energy demand but only a fifth of

4:37 its energy supply. The majority of the world's energy supply comes from countries that were pointedly not invited to the conference. More on that later. Now, sadly, I wasn't at this conference, but everything that I have read about how it was conducted, the energy of people there, and what we've seen of the outcomes, it's kind of what we all hoped would happen. It's kind of what we really wanted cops to be all along. Both in the sense of who was there because, you know, there was national representatives from 56 different countries, but there were also scientists present, women's groups, youth groups, indigenous groups, civil society groups. There were 2,600 civil society and community organizations taking part in this thing. But also in terms of how it was conducted, I'd like to refer you to Carbon Brief's excellent breakdown of the event. Definitely read

5:23 their article for more. And they describe how the organizers at the conference broke people down into small groups, an inner circle of 12 national representatives, and then an outer circle of indigenous groups, those other stakeholders that I mentioned. And importantly, everybody was allowed to speak and everybody had to listen. And the meetings were reported on using what's called Chattam House rules, which means you could report what happened in a meeting, but you couldn't say who said it. So, countries and groups were far freer to speak than they otherwise would be. And just to read you their reporting, many countries were highly complimentary of this informal format, describing it in the closing plenary as refreshing, highly successful, and a safe space for discussion. And in particular, I love this quote from the uh special representative on climate change from Panama who said, "I'm going

6:08 to be honest. At first, I was like, "What the am I doing here? I don't know where this is going." But then as the workshop started, I realized there were ministers, envoys, civil society leaders, and indigenous people. They put us in a format where we could not open our computers, so we had to speak from our minds and our hearts. That completely flipped my perception. That kind of space I haven't seen in my 10year history with the UNF C. It's just great. Like not only is this conference upending the playbook of, you know, who's attending and this coalition of the willing idea, but it's also changing how the nuts and bolts of the conference work. This is great. But okay, what was actually agreed at the conference? Well, first of all, let's temper expectations. This conference was not going to solve the climate crisis on its own. You weren't going to get a date where all

6:55 countries were going to stop using fossil fuels, and it it wasn't going to be this legally binding thing with penalties, right? That just wasn't going to happen. You know, it took us three cops to get to the Kyoto agreement. As I already mentioned, they've published a document showing the preliminary outcomes from this conference, which I'll be showing through this video, but you can check it out down below. The first key outcome was that this is going to be an ongoing process. There's going to be another conference like this early next year which is going to be co-hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland, but it's going to take place in Tuvalu, a country of 11,000 people which uh might potentially be facing a come from away type situation where the population doubles overnight. >> We got 38 planes. We got two 300 people on the average.

7:41 I really want someone to write a musical about that one, too. And you might think that is a strange pairing of countries. I certainly did, but I quite like the justification that Ireland gave. They basically said that this was a deliberate choice, picking two island nations from opposite sides of the planet, but they had this shared goal and keeping equity at the heart of this transition, which yeah, I quite like. And what these ongoing conferences are going to do is provide the forum, the necessary forum to link national climate policies with the big international stuff at COP, which doesn't really exist at the moment, which is kind of bananas. And importantly, this new forum isn't meant to replace COPs. Those are still going to happen. What this is doing is supplementing, complementing that process with the countries who are willing to actually do something all clubbing together. and specifically they

8:27 want to accomplish that through three conversation streams. Firstly, collaborating to build national and regional fossil fuel transition road maps. Now, each country is obliged to produce something called an NDC, a nationally determined contribution, which basically says we're going to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by this much over this many years. But that's not the same thing as a road map. That's a target. It's not how you get there. And the point of this stream is to let countries share expertise, share plans so that they can actually build road maps. I think really importantly, not just for their countries, but for entire regions. That's like a that's a big deal. Then the second stream is all about trade policies and specifically trade in carbon intense goods. So addressing the fact that a country like the UK for example might have brought down its domestic emissions by over 50%

9:14 since 1990 but its overall emissions accounting for the fact that it's importing carbon intense stuff from elsewhere have dropped but not by that much. I think it's by about 25%. So this will involve conversations around mechanisms like the uh seban the carbon border adjustment mechanism that the EU recently introduced. And then this third stream is about the black sheep of all climate negotiations which is finance. Like we know that transitioning to a net zero economy is the cheapest option available to us. It is cheaper than the catastrophic climate damages of not doing so, but it's still going to be expensive. Even though the individual technologies are cheaper than the fossil fuel alternatives, you're rewiring the entire global economy and it's going to cost a lot of money. And so you're not going to make the transition happen unless people have access to the money. And you've got to do that in a way that

10:00 is fair. So this stream is all about making sure people have access to the money but that we don't trap countries in debt traps that we don't unleash a wave of neocolonialism in the global south and most importantly in my opinion this uh stream explicitly mentions the need to reform fossil fuel subsidies. That was like a a key discussion point and I guess sort of overarching all those three streams a key takeaway from this conference is that international cooperation around climate is alive and well. these countries are talking to each other and listening and and fortunately in 2026 that's noteworthy. And another thing that's noteworthy is that this conference really put an emphasis on evidence-based policy decisions and this is something we also saw at COP 30 that it was meant to be the COP of truth and I think they pretty much did deliver on that. In this case

10:46 though, the fact that they preceded the highle conference with a scientific conference and the fact that scientists then produced briefing documents that they passed to negotiators is really significant because those scientists were free to make pointed recommendations which they don't do as part of the the really big organization which is the IPCC. The IPCC's language has to be neutral. It doesn't say you should be doing this or you should be doing that. In this case, scientists were free to say, "Don't allow for any new fossil fuel extraction. Set ambitious near-term targets for methane emission reductions." And I mean, as far as we can tell, they will listen to. And importantly, actually, this is something that they'll be doing year on year going forward, providing pre-conference recommendations, something that is so far removed from the seven or so year

11:33 cycle of IPCC reports. This is going to be far more upto-date. If you'd like to see all those recommendations, then I'll leave a link to carbon brief coverage of them down in the description. And then someone who was mentioned but doubtless will not listen was President Trump. Uh I think President Trump is going to get a lot of credit at this conference for hastening the transition. Because if I quote the uh final text here, sorry, preliminary final text, with 75% of the world dependent on fossil fuel imports, the current conflict in the Middle East has laid bare the urgency of moving towards more stable energy supplies. As I mentioned in my last video, this conflict is only going to steepen the slope of the transition. And um thanks Mr. President. It's almost like the fossil fuel industry got their preferred idiot in the White House and were like, "We want you to change the world." And the monkeyy's paw just

12:20 curled. Right. So that's all the stuff that is going to be happening going forwards. We've set up these conferences. We know what they are for. We know what they're going to be talking about and we know some specifics about what they are targeting. But what happened at this conference? Well, in terms of concrete stuff that happened as a result of this conference, France has posted its phase out plan. It definitely had done all the work for that before this conference. It's just showing off, but good. Well done, France. We know that the Netherlands is now coordinating and identifying fossil fuel subsidies around the world and getting countries to report them. And we know that Colombia also has a fossil fuel phase out plan because scientists delivered a bespoke one to Colombia at the conference and basically said, "Look, this is going to be expensive to begin with." Yes. But by the 2040s, you are going to be saving a lot of money. And there may be more stuff that comes

13:05 out in the coming days. As I said, I'm recording this very quickly. But that's all the concrete stuff that we know about really again just to set expectations. This conference was going to be about setting things up. It's going to be the next conferences that are really significant, especially considering who might be there because pointedly not invited to this conference were China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia. the 80% of the world's energy supply, fossil fuel producers. And of course, that's because this was always meant to be the coalition of the willing. It was the people at COP 30 who said, "We're sick of not making progress. Let's just do it ourselves." And there's definitely an argument to be made that even without the consensus mechanism that, you know, was holding things up before and those countries were abusing that mechanism.

13:51 There's something to be said for just having good faith actors in the room and setting the architecture of these conferences in that space. Some experts are saying that they probably were too cautious about not inviting countries like you know Indonesia is one example that was brought up but my gut's telling me that this was the right decision for this conference going forward it's going to be very interesting to see how they expand the circle of it's this isn't just people who are coming it's people who were invited to be there it's basically a determination of right how serious are you about this but it is one thing to focus on the demand side of things and as I said you know like a third of energy demand half the world's economy being represented at this at this conference. That's good, but you're not going to get anywhere just by focusing on demand. You've also got to

14:36 focus on the supply and how that process is handled and how those countries interact with these ongoing conferences. That's going to determine how historic Santa Marta was because yeah, it was historic. First time this had ever been done. Huge step forward. Like I I really probably should stress this more. This was a breakthrough in international climate diplomacy. But how successful it was and how history will look back on its being historic will determine on the next few chapters of the story. If if all the cops so far were chapter one of how the world brought itself to net zero, then this might be the start of chapter 2. And it's the rest of this chapter and maybe chapter three that's about how countries like Saudi Arabia diversified their economies. That's going to be where the rubber meets the road and how successful this actually was. But Santa Marta was the change that

15:23 we needed. It is COP reform outside of COP and it's really exciting. All the people I know who I've spoken to about this and it's the coverage that I've seen, there's an energy here. It's progress. It's the progress that we really need. Now, in this video, we've been talking about really highlevel negotiations. And unless you're in like 0.01% of my audience, you probably can't really relate to that. But I'm sure you can relate to the feelings of anxiety, fear even around what we are doing to this planet and what this century might look like. For me, that's most pronounced in the impact we're having on nature because humans are very adaptable. Nature and natural systems we depend on less so. And that's why I've been part of a community for several months now working to protect and

16:10 restore natural environments through crowdfunding specific missions. We're called Planet Wild and so far this year we've crowdfunded restoration of petland in Belgium, wildlife crossings in British Columbia and connecting forest fragments in Brazil. Every mission is documented through a video on YouTube so we can see what our contributions have achieved and all of them have a report on the app and their website listing the objectives and the personnel as well as one-year updates. The latest mission this month has been buying a cloud forest to grow a reserve for jaguars and other wild cats and rewing land that have previously been used to graze cattle in Colombia. In case you can't tell, I really like this. I mean, the individual missions are really varied and interesting and they work with experienced partners on the ground. But

16:56 more than that, I like how it's a community. Whenever you open up the app, you can explore and look at past missions and see how many people have interacted with them and how much money has been raised. And you get this impression of being in a community that's actually doing something all over the world. And if you would like to join that community of over 20,000 members, you can do so right now. In fact, the first 100 people to sign up with my code, Simon 24, all caps, will get their first month paid for by me. Scan a QR code that's on screen or click the link in the description. No, not I'm not kidding. I I really am paying for it. You can give whatever amount per month you like. Really, every dollar does make a difference here. And in less than 30 days, you will see the result of your contribution in the app and on their

17:41 excellent YouTube channel. And you can cancel anytime. Please do consider signing up and making a difference to conservation projects around the world. And if you want to see them in action, take a look at their latest mission in Colombia. This video was made possible thanks to the support of my patrons who you can see on screen right now. Every video I shout out three patrons who manage to win the Patreon marble race. Patrons get early access to my work. They get exclusive content, notably a behind-the-scenes vlog every month. And a producer tier and above can vote on topics for me to cover. Right, the finish is over here. And whoa, did somebody just jump way ahead. Who is that? And coming in at the finish. Whoa. Oh, who's going to go down first with congratulations to John Novice, Andy Par, and Bridget for winning the marble

18:27 race. Please do consider supporting at patreon.com/simonoxfizz. Thank you for watching the video. As I said, this was a bit different for me. I'm just trying to live synthesize a bunch of information on my laptop. I hope that you took something from it. And if you'd like to see more videos from me, then please do subscribe. Uh here's two videos I prepared earlier. And that just leaves me to say thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.