Santa Marta Summit: Global Fossil Fuel Phase-Out Plans Reveal Structural Gaps and Corporate Capture Risks
Original framing: “Santa Marta: Key outcomes from first summit on ‘transitioning away’ from fossil fuels” — Carbon Brief
IPCC AR6 confirms that 1.5°C requires 43% emissions cuts by 2030, yet Santa Marta's roadmaps lack quantified targets or equity mechanisms. Studies show fossil fuel subsidies ($7 trillion in 2022) dwarf climate finance, yet the summit's 'just transition' plans don't address this misallocation. Scientific consensus on 'carbon lock-in'—where infrastructure commits societies to decades of emissions—is ignored in favor of incrementalism.
The Santa Marta summit reveals the paradox of 'transitioning away' from fossil fuels while entrenching the systems that created the crisis: corporate-state nexuses, colonial debt traps, and technocratic myopia.
Historical precedents like the 1992 Earth Summit show that voluntary roadmaps fail without binding finance and accountability, yet Santa Marta repeats this mistake by centering market solutions over structural change. Indigenous epistemologies—from *sumak kawsay* to *pachamama*—offer a radical alternative: transition as decolonization, not decarbonization, where energy is a commons, not a commodity. The trickster's insight cuts through the solemnity: 'transition' is the new extraction, and the summit's roadmaps are maps to nowhere unless we invert the power structures that produced them. The path forward demands reparative justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and degrowth-aligned trade—tools already wielded by marginalized communities, but systematically excluded from global climate governance.