Phaseout or Phase-Around: The Geopolitics of Fossil Fuel Addiction in the Age of Hormuz

On 17 April 2026, Colombia announced what the Guardian characterised as a "coalition of the willing" — a diplomatic grouping of states committed to breaking what Bogotá's foreign minister called a "global fossil fuel deadlock." The timing was, at minimum, ironic. That same day, Bloomberg's ship-tracking systems showed five LNG carriers diverting from Hormuz routes following Iran's warnings to vessels in the Persian Gulf. Oil prices, which had briefly spiked above $90 per barrel, retreated below that threshold when Tehran announced partial reopening of the strait — a choreography of coercion and relief that demonstrated, with uncomfortable clarity, how thoroughly global energy systems remain structured around the fossil fuels that Colombia's coalition is proposing to phase out. Simultaneously, Australian media reported that emissions from the country's coal mines were quietly increasing, even as Canberra maintained its climate commitments in formal diplomatic settings.

The gap between what climate diplomacy proposes and what energy geopolitics permits is not incidental. It is structural — and understanding that structure requires moving beyond the framing that treats fossil fuel dependency as a technical or economic problem awaiting an engineering solution. Unequal exchange analysis maps the terrain: fossil fuel exporters in the Global South, from Venezuela to Nigeria to Kazakhstan, have been integrated into the global accumulation system specifically through their resource endowments. Demanding that they cease extraction without addressing the terms of that integration — without debt relief, technology transfer, and genuine climate finance — is fossil capital logic applied in reverse: the same system that built the infrastructure of carbon now moralises about its elimination while protecting the financial architecture that makes elimination impossible for the poorest producers.

The Coalition of the Willing and Its Limits

Colombia's diplomatic initiative builds on the precedent of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA), launched at COP26, which gathered a small number of states — Denmark, Costa Rica, France, Wales, Ireland, Quebec, among others — committed to setting end-dates for oil and gas production. The initiative garnered rhetorical support but limited participation from major producers, and none from the United States, Canada, or OPEC member states. Colombia's iteration, emerging from a government under President Petro that has already signalled its intention to stop issuing new oil and gas exploration licences domestically, attempts to broaden the coalition and frame fossil fuel phaseout as a Southern-led initiative rather than a Northern imposition.

This framing matters enormously. The standard climate diplomacy script — wealthy nations urging poorer ones to forgo the fossil fuel development paths that wealthy nations themselves exploited — erases development history. Colombia's approach attempts a different positioning: a major producer voluntarily accepting constraints and inviting others to join, thereby transforming the political economy of the demand. But the structural problem remains: Colombia's oil revenues fund a significant fraction of the social programs that Petro's government relies on to deliver the material redistributions that sustain its political coalition. Phaseout without replacement finance is austerity with a green label.

Kazakhstan, CITIC, and the Eastward Pivot

While Colombia convenes its coalition, Kazakhstan is demonstrating an alternative trajectory. Nikkei Asia reported on 18 April 2026 that Kazakhstan's gas sector is "spurning Western partners for CITIC" — the Chinese state investment conglomerate — in a move that signals a broader reorientation of Central Asian energy geopolitics toward Beijing rather than Brussels. This is not a climate story in any immediate sense, but it is a phaseout story in the most consequential one: if the capital infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction in the post-Soviet space is being rebuilt under Chinese financing, the leverage that Western climate diplomacy hopes to exercise through investment conditionality evaporates. CITIC does not require environmental, social, and governance frameworks as a condition of financing. It requires resource access and long-term supply agreements.

The Kazakhstani government would note, not unreasonably, that its citizens' social foundation is currently supported by fossil revenues and that the ecological ceiling is a problem created overwhelmingly by wealthy nations. The geopolitical pivot to CITIC is, from this perspective, a rational response to a global climate governance architecture that lectures resource-exporting states about phaseout while offering inadequate replacement financing and maintaining its own fossil fuel subsidies.

Australia's Coal Paradox and the Domestic Accountability Gap

The Guardian's analysis published 18 April 2026 asked directly: Australia's coalmine emissions are increasing — is this how a major policy to cut climate pollution is meant to work? The answer embedded in the reporting is no, but the political economy of the situation explains why it is happening regardless. Australia's safeguard mechanism, the centre-piece of the Albanese government's industrial emissions policy, exempts a significant fraction of coalmine expansion from its coverage through baseline calculations that reward historical high emitters. An independent campaign group, "Energy for Australians," which ran advertisements attacking the Labor government's climate policies, was revealed to have received more than $1 million from the coal lobby — a disclosure that illuminates the propaganda infrastructure sustaining fossil fuel political power in a nominally committed climate state.

The financial relationships between fossil fuel interests and the political communication industry systematically distort the information environment in which climate policy is debated and decided — advertising bias made visible at the climate policy level. George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian on 18 April, offered a characteristically provocative inversion: that Trump's fossil fuel advocacy may inadvertently accelerate green transition by forcing European and Asian economies to develop energy independence. The argument has a structural logic — energy insecurity is a powerful accelerant of transition — but it elides the decade-long delay that fossil fuel political power has imposed on climate action, a delay that is now measured in hundreds of billions of dollars of climate loss.

The Hormuz Variable and Stranded Asset Risk

The Hormuz crisis has introduced a variable that climate economists had modelled theoretically but not expected to materialise so dramatically: fossil fuel infrastructure as geopolitical liability. When five LNG tankers reroute simultaneously because a single chokepoint becomes contested, the fragility of the global energy system built around fossil fuel concentration is exposed. Renewable energy systems are not immune to supply chain disruption — solar panel manufacturing is geographically concentrated, wind turbine components traverse contested supply chains — but they do not share the structural vulnerability of energy systems whose primary feedstock transits a handful of maritime chokepoints controlled or threatened by regional powers.

Political ecology analysis situates this moment as a juncture at which the contradictions of fossil capital accumulate to a point of systemic instability — not merely ecological but geopolitical, financial, and military. The question Colombia's coalition poses — whether a voluntary diplomatic framework can achieve what market logic and geopolitical competition have not — deserves a serious answer. The preliminary evidence from Hormuz, from Kazakhstan's CITIC pivot, and from Australia's quietly rising coalmine emissions suggests that the answer, without structural financial transformation, is probably no.

Monexus framed this piece around the geopolitical rather than the technological dimensions of phaseout, because the engineering of energy transition is less constrained than the political economy that surrounds it.