The summit also helped to spotlight the obstacles to climate justice. Front and centre was the so-called Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanism, or ISDS, which allows private corporations to sue states for loss of revenues. The system is transparently rigged in favour of private interests and consistently rules against states that try to limit fossil expansion or implement green policies. The Netherlands first introduced ISDS into an investment treaty and is now, ironically, being sued by Shell on account of environmental regulations. Across the globe, it has played a significant role in obstructing coal phaseout. Colombia has led the campaign to bury the ISDS, announcing just weeks before the Santa Marta conference that they would no longer abide by its rules, and encouraging other countries to follow suit. Future summits could be a forum for building an organised, transnational opposition to this kind of investor blackmail.
Yet this is only one part of the broader architecture of global finance, whose debt traps, structural readjustment programmes and unequal trading relations prevent countries from adopting renewables. The uneven cost of borrowing often shuts down ambitions to phase out fossil fuels in their earliest stages. ‘We are in a situation where ambition is punished’, laments the former Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad. ‘Access to capital for the South is very expensive, and in these conditions, the transition will be very difficult. We will need reforms so that rather than punishing, we should prioritize climate action.’
Academics and policymakers are grappling with the technical aspects of designing an alternative financial regime. Yet for any such attempt to succeed it would need to be backed by a coalition of states — one large enough to loosen the chokehold of international financial institutions and major corporations. This is no simple task. In Santa Marta, the Dutch government refused to endorse a ‘just transition away from fossil fuels’, defanging the motion by removing the word ‘just’. It also rejected attempts to centre the conference discussions around a fossil fuel treaty: a global initiative for a legally-binding instrument whereby countries would commit to no new fossil fuel production.
Instead, the summit’s final declaration focused on voluntary domestic roadmaps. Mechanisms that would allow states to build real counter-power, and give them the authority to sanction those standing in the way of the transition, were absent. Though it was billed as a conference of countries that already agree on the need for decarbonisation and must figure out how to put it into practice, the presence of Norway and Australia — two nations aggressively expanding their fossil economies — was hard to justify within this framework. Britain’s status as a green nation was likewise undermined by the prospective oil and gas projects at Jackdaw and Rosebank.
The academic part of the event involved little discussion of the difficulties of forging an effective international alliance. Despite Petro’s reminder that ‘the struggle against climate change is a political and a social one, not just a scientific one’, many researchers seemed to reach for technological and market-based solutions rather than confront the immediate problems of coalition-building. Some even wore red caps emblazoned with the call to ‘Make Science Great Again’. Science, of course, only becomes policy only when it is articulated through politics. The recent widespread backlash to climate measures, and the decision of many states to resile from them, shows that the depth of such politics determines whether green policies can endure.