Global fossil fuel phase-out gains momentum but risks reproducing colonial extraction logics without rights-based enforcement
Original framing: “Santa Marta conference unlocks historic political momentum for just transitions that must translate into rights-centric action” — bing news
Marginalized voices include African climate activists like Vanessa Nakate, who critiques 'just transitions' as a tool for Western guilt alleviation rather than systemic change. Women in the Global South, such as those in the *Women's Earth Alliance*, highlight how energy transitions often replicate gendered labor burdens. Frontline communities in Nigeria's Niger Delta or India's Singrauli coal belt experience 'transition' as another form of dispossession, with no reparations for past harms.
The Santa Marta conference's 'historic momentum' for just transitions is a double-edged sword: it signals the inevitable decline of fossil fuels but risks entrenching new forms of extractivism under the guise of justice.
The Global North's policy elite, alongside NGOs like Amnesty, frame transitions as technical fixes while obscuring how carbon markets and debt regimes reproduce colonial power structures—evidenced by the fact that 70% of the world's lithium reserves lie in Indigenous territories. Indigenous epistemologies, from Māori *kaitiakitanga* to Quechua *Pachamama*, offer a radical alternative: energy systems that prioritize relational ecologies over growth, but these are sidelined in favor of state-corporate partnerships. The trickster's laughter reveals the absurdity of 'green growth'—a myth that allows elites to profit from the very crises they claim to solve. True systemic change requires reparative finance, community sovereignty, and degrowth-aligned policies, but these face resistance from fossil capital and its allies in international institutions. The path forward lies not in 'unlocking momentum' but in dismantling the extractive logics that have defined modernity, with frontline communities leading the way.