Yes, There Is Some Global Action on Phasing Out Fossil Fuels

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Paloma Beltran with Tzeporah Berman, the founder of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.

As the United Nations gears up for the COP31 climate session in mid-November, nearly three decades after the Kyoto Protocol, there’s a newer set of international climate negotiations intended to close the yawning gap between discussion and action.

The first Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels was held this April in Santa Marta, Colombia. It’s known to proponents as the “coalition of the willing.” The conference was co-hosted by then-Colombian President Gustavo Petro and the government of the Netherlands, with the global campaign led by Tzeporah Berman through the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, which she founded. The event brought together 57 countries and the European Union as well as civil society organizations, scientists, Indigenous leaders and more. 

Born out of frustration with fossil-fuel friendly nations and the oil and gas lobbyists involved in the COP process, this fossil fuel treaty effort is kickstarting an alternative approach to international cooperation on climate. The second conference is coming up in just a few months.

Berman is the founder and chairperson of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PALOMA BELTRAN: Six months after the first conference, what is the energy like from the countries who are interested in transitioning away from fossil fuels?

TZEPORAH BERMAN: In some ways, we’re starting to see groupings of countries within the process. There were 57 countries that came. I think at the next international conference, which will be co-hosted by Ireland and Tuvalu in 2027, there’s going to be even more, because I’ve been talking to a lot of countries that are like, “Wow, it happened really quick.” I think the broad coalition of countries that are committed to a fossil-fuel phaseout will grow, and that’s exciting. 

There are also specific conversations that began in Santa Marta that are now deepening—conversations on specific solutions. There is a group of countries which I think of as the high-ambition coalition on fossil-fuel phaseout that are at the table starting to design a fossil-fuel treaty. There are 25 or so countries that are at the table working on this, and these are countries that are really committed to new global governance on the fossil fuel phaseout—legal strategies so that they can be binding, not just voluntary, and cooperative mechanisms. 

There are a lot of countries that are digging for more oil, fracking for more gas because they feel like they have to, like they’re being pushed into it because of crushing debt, because of financial architecture and tax agreements and trade agreements that have existed historically to prop up the fossil fuel industry and push fossil fuel production. These are countries that want to cooperate on some of those big-picture solutions like debt. Those countries are hard at work looking at different legal mechanisms and mechanisms of international cooperation. There’s a group of countries that are working specifically on fossil fuel subsidies and encouraging countries to get rid of subsidizing the oil and gas industry. And there’s a number of countries that are now doing national roadmaps, which are great, and that’s increasing ambition within the UNFCCC and COP spaces as well. 

There’s not one answer to phasing out the most powerful industry on Earth. It’s going to take multiple initiatives, and I think these conferences have really sparked a lot of new bilateral and plurilateral convenings and cooperations.

BELTRAN: How does a potential fossil fuel treaty exist in relation to the United Nations and the Paris Agreement?

BERMAN: A lot of people don’t realize that any issue that we work on within the U.N. has multiple agreements, multiple treaties associated with it. It’s not uncommon to have different agreements and treaties on different aspects of a big problem: landmines, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons. So what we are proposing is that the fossil fuel treaty would be a companion to the Paris Agreement. It would be international agreements on helping phase out the production of fossil fuels in a way that is equitable and fair. 

We don’t have that. For 30 years our countries have been negotiating on emissions reductions—so, how much each country gets to pollute—but not on reducing the supply and production of fossil fuels. An economist would say it’s like trying to cut with one half of the scissors—only the demand, but not the supply. Every year we negotiate new emissions-reduction targets, and then every year we grow new projects and new development, and then we fail to meet our targets. But it’s not rocket science. What we build today will be what we use tomorrow. 

BELTRAN: This fossil fuel treaty we’re talking about was not initiated by the United Nations. It was spearheaded by you, with a formal campaign launching in 2020. How is it different from U.N. processes and conventions?

BERMAN: It is likely that the fossil fuel treaty will become a U.N. process. It’s not right now, and that historically is what we’ve seen with a lot of tricky, intransigent issues: landmines, chemical weapons, nuclear. These are treaties that were created initially outside the U.N. process, especially landmines. 

We got the idea of the Santa Marta conference from landmines, because land mines were an issue that was really not moving forward in the U.N. space, because there are vested interests who were adamant not to have the conversation. They wanted to expand landmines. Ottawa created the Ottawa Convention, which was the precursor to the landmine agreement, and it was again a coalition of the willing: “Fine, you don’t want to talk about it? Don’t come, because you’re holding back the conversation.” That process outside the U.N. space is what created the landmine ban treaty, which was eventually brought back inside the U.N. Working along that framework and that model, we’re working with a group of countries that want to create a fossil fuel treaty, and they’re starting to design it. Once they design the treaty and negotiate the terms, and more countries join, it is likely that that will be brought back inside the U.N.

BELTRAN: How would it benefit from becoming part of the U.N. process?

BERMAN: Infrastructure and buy-in. These conferences and a lot of the diplomatic work—without having structure and infrastructure and the support of the U.N.—it’s a little spit and duct tape. It’s not easy to bring a conference together of 5,000 to 10,000 people and without private money invested and without the infrastructure to invite all the countries to do the security for all the ministers. 

There’s infrastructure, history and expertise within the U.N. in diplomacy, and no one treaty or agreement between countries is going to exist in isolation. When it becomes an issue of foreign policy debate, there’s a little bit of tit for tat, a little bit of trade in foreign diplomacy, and so these issues need a cycle. They need a structure, and they need to exist within the ecosystem of the other international agreements.

BELTRAN: Most of the nations that are early participants in these negotiations are not major fossil fuel producers. What does a path forward look like for getting more buy-in on this?

BERMAN: There are some who are major fossil fuel producers. For example, Colombia is the fifth-largest coal exporter in the world, and they have joined the table of the fossil fuel treaty. It’s not a formal negotiating table yet; it’s a discussion table. Certainly, some of the countries have communicated to us that they’re hoping to develop a formal negotiating mandate later in 2027. That’s their goal, and I think they will do that. 

Once the formal negotiating mandate exists and the negotiations begin, that’s a moment when a lot more countries join, because if you’re not at the table, you’re not designing the rules. We already have about 25 countries at the table. There’s an expectation that once that formal negotiating table is created, we’ll probably have 35 to 40. A lot of treaties were built on 20 to 40 countries being the ones to participate. 

Then, once the treaty is designed and countries start to see, ‘Oh wait a minute, there’s benefits for being a part of that group—it’s not just all stick; there’s lots of carrots embedded in the frameworks that are being discussed at the treaty table. 

The third issue is about social norms. What we’ve learned from studying the other treaties is that there are some countries that will never join, but actually that’s OK, because if you look at the other big issues there are countries that never joined, but they changed their practices because the treaty itself and the development of the treaty shifted the social norm around that issue. It became “elephants for ivory” to be saying you’re stockpiling landmines or you’re stockpiling nuclear weapons, even if you hadn’t signed the treaty, because before the campaign and the development of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, stockpiling nuclear weapons was considered something that kept us safe. It was through that campaign and the development of the treaty that experts around the world were saying, “We already have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world six times over, and what’s threatening us is more nuclear capacity,” and so that social norm shifted. It shifted from being something that keeps you safe to something that’s threatening you. 

I think that’s what we’re seeing happen on fossil fuels … There are 4,000 organizations now in 120 countries that have endorsed the idea of a fossil fuel treaty and are working on it, so that starts to shift what is acceptable. When that shift happens within foreign policy, that will change the practices, I believe, of many of the other countries. It won’t be so easy for Australia to announce a new coal mine while also saying it’s a climate leader.

BELTRAN: What do you see as the biggest barriers for this treaty moving forward?

BERMAN: One of the biggest barriers to moving forward on fossil fuel phaseout is the fearmongering by the oil and gas industry around scarcity, and around price and affordability. They’re very powerful. This is an industry that has made $2.8 billion a day in pure profit every day for the last 50 years. They have unlimited resources to run communications campaigns on social media and to fearmonger around, for example, the price of your gas is going to go up if they stop drilling. That’s actually not true. Price is not related to new drilling—but they argued that in California through an ad campaign, and they won. And Gavin Newsom reversed his decision to stop expanding drilling because the oil industry had people so scared. 

Commercials and ads all over the world that the oil industry is funding tell people that if people start working on fossil fuel phaseout, that the economy will collapse. The term I keep seeing in all the ads is “Your hospitals will be closed and your roads won’t be paved.” That is not true. Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. Countries have the capacity to support export revenues from multiple industries besides fossil fuels. 

In fact, fossil fuels are one of the priciest things for our countries to do because we subsidize the oil and gas industry, and then we’re left with the bills of the cleanup, and the health concerns. Between 5 million and 7 million people died last year on the planet just from air pollution due to fossil fuels alone, and one person is dying every minute now due to lethal heat, primarily due to fossil fuels. If we start to phase out fossil fuels, our lives actually become cleaner, safer and more affordable.

BELTRAN: Midway between the first two meetings of this conference, how optimistic do you feel about this process?

BERMAN: It’s honestly the only thing right now that’s giving me hope, that makes me feel optimistic. These conferences are creating new conversations that are decades overdue. This will be my sixteenth COP in Turkey, and it’s been extremely frustrating. It’s been the same conversation, the refusal to address fossil fuels. This year, we changed that. That will have huge ramifications. It’ll save lives. 

I think we’re actually living in one of the most exciting times in human history. We are reinventing industrial society. We’re watching it happen around the world. 

The question for us now is how quickly will it happen, and how many lives can we save? That requires all hands on deck. 

Hope is something we create. We create it by waking up in the morning and deciding, what’s our piece of the puzzle? What can we do? And everyone can do something. This is a movement that includes individuals, businesses, faith leaders, health leaders, everyone around the world. Make it your own, because we need all hands on deck.