Colombia's New President Gustavo Petro Pledges To Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground (climatechangenews.com) 88
Colombia has elected its first left-wing president, setting the Latin American nation on a path to wind down its fossil fuel production. From a report: Leftist Gustavo Petro was voted in Sunday night alongside Goldman prize-winning environmental campaigner Francia Marquez, the nation's first black and second female vice-president. In his manifesto, Petro committed to "undertake a gradual de-escalation of economic dependence on oil and coal." He committed not to grant any new licenses for hydrocarbon exploration during his four-year mandate and to halt all pilot fracking projects and the development of offshore fossil fuels. "These are not baby steps but huge steps towards the transition and reducing fossil fuels," said Colombian environmentalist Martin Ramirez.
If Petro formalises his commitments to phasedown fossil fuel production, Colombia could become the largest fossil fuel producer to do so. At the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow last year, Costa Rica and Denmark launched an alliance of countries committed to phasing out oil and gas production known as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, collectively accounting for 0.2% of global oil production. Colombia produces around 1% of the world's coal, oil and gas.
If Petro formalises his commitments to phasedown fossil fuel production, Colombia could become the largest fossil fuel producer to do so. At the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow last year, Costa Rica and Denmark launched an alliance of countries committed to phasing out oil and gas production known as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, collectively accounting for 0.2% of global oil production. Colombia produces around 1% of the world's coal, oil and gas.
"Look at all the money we're not making." (Score:1)
While I applaud the sentiment, I'm not convinced a country like Colombia can afford the grand-standing. What will the World Bank and the IMF say, come debt-restructuring time?
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Re: "Look at all the money we're not making." (Score:2)
I'm not convinced a country like Colombia can afford the grand-standing
I don't see why not. The regular folk are going to be dirt poor either way.
Re:"Look at all the money we're not making." (Score:4, Interesting)
It could also be them avoiding the Bubble, A lot of small countries who jump onto the the new economic bubble fad, end up taking the brunt of the harm after it pops.
Countries like the US, have a large diverse economy, we can afford to jump on the Bubble, as our economy is large enough to deal with the pop. While a small country like Columbia, If went and invested heavy in Oil, they would have an influx of cash, and build communities around the Gas and Oil locations, and a large number of people getting into the industry for work. Only for a few years down the line for Gas Prices to drop, and then having to lay off these workers, the complex infrastructure communities will rot, and the extra money that was made during the boom, was not saved for a rainy day, but spent of luxury... Then people who are now poor get angry at the government.
Re:"Look at all the money we're not making." (Score:4, Insightful)
While it is bad for the economy, it is good for the population, because the goverment will have to cater to everything else, instead of just being a parrot on the shoulder of the oil company.
Countries that have all the economy depending on basically one resource are horrible.
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Countries that have all the economy depending on basically one resource are horrible.
Oil and coal are a small part of Colombia's economy. Hydrocarbon exports are 3% of GDP.
Colombia pumping less oil will just mean autocratic countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia will pump more.
Fossil fuel consumption will be fixed on the demand side, not the supply side.
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Good for em then, well colombia.
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Really? The US has been exporting oil again as of a few years ago. I haven't noticed it being good for us, with the current price of oil, and the massive increases in profits by the oil companies.
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I see: extract the oil, screw the environment, you have no kids anyway, and don't care about anyone else... and when they run out of oil, then what?
Nice pairing (Score:1)
Colombia's New President Gustavo Petro Pledges To Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground
That pretty much ensures a lot of Columbian citizens will be in the ground, too.
Guess he hates fertilizer and food.
Re: Nice pairing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They already did (Score:5, Informative)
USA has been supporting left-wing leaders in South America for quite a while now
United States involvement in regime change in Latin America [wikipedia.org]
Lot of "left wing" military junta's in there by chance.
Can I get whatever Columbian narcotic you were one when you came up with this theory?
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If it's gonna be a dictatorship, might as well be one friendly to the US.
This is a lesson learned the hard way with Cuba, where he took over, ran off to NY expecting accolades, was rebuffed, so ran to the Soviet Union.
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Like Batista and the Shah of Iran? Batista made Cuba rich by selling it to US corporations: Obviously, not a sustainable plan and he still wasn't rich enough to suppress all the dissent caused by his kleptocracy. American policies and American capitalism caused the Cuban revolution but the USA excused their own greed with victim-shaming.
Of course, "unfriendly to the US", even a little bit, explains the massive attempt to regime-change Nicaragua when it chose the Sandinista socialist party.
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You forgot how the Mafia ran Havana, for real.
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So wait, you think Biden supporting Lula when we just a mere 30 months ago had a president who fully supported Bolsanaro, who even had Bolsanaro at the White House is a good enough example to counter nearly 6 decades of United States official policy that had the prescritption of overthrowing and usurping left wing political leaders in favor of right wing and military ones.
I think the president supporting who he feels is the better choice is a far cry from anything resembling a sustained policy response like
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Also are we just going to mind wipe what happened in 2019 in Bolivia?
DOJ Threatened MIT Reearchers with Subpoena in collaboration with Bolivian Coup regime [theintercept.com]
Silence reigns on the US-backed coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia [theguardian.com]
Now, I am not making prescriptions as to who is right here or really if the US did anything out of bounds here, but this notion that US policy in regards to Latin America is suddenly in the bag for left wing leaders is, just no shot, no shot at all.
The US is in the bag for whoever they ca
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lol call me a boomer all you want, you are entirely brain poisoned to reflexively to pin the "left wing bad" reasoning onto everything, even if it is entirely ahistorical.
None of those examples counter what I said, in that the US will seek to support parties that support US interests. Usually in history those are right wing but they'll take lefties if it works out. The way you just discard the entire historical context because it fits your narrative makes an entirely unserious argument.
Seriously, put aside
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... there is plenty of blame to go around in how we have fucked up our southern hemisphere.
Pretty much true. Much of the US influence in South and Central America is tied to monetary support from the United States [state.gov]. Sending over a billion dollars to Colombia since 2016 for "peace implementation" raises some eyebrows for sure.
I can't tell how effectively that money has been spent... (my guess is that the groups allocating the money to Colombia expect a return on their investment)
"Never Mind" (Score:1)
Never mind Lula was convicted of corruption
"Never Mind"? To the CIA being convicted of corruption is like you sending in a tech resume saying you've worked for ten years on a technology that's only been around for five. It makes them salivate.
Re: They already did (Score:2)
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Historically, "left" was pro-capitalist, anti-feudal, pro-constitution, anti-absolute monarchy. And French.
Once the left won and there was nobody left on the right they made all the left guys go sit on the right side of the room and some "further left" guys started talking about maybe moving beyond capitalism and stuff.
Re: They already did (Score:2)
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Left wing is not the same as Communism, Right wing is not the same a fascism. There is Ideology then there is implementation.
Successful Left Wing governments have an Educated and Active electorate, who keeps the rulers in check, and make sure they are working for the people, and not for themselves.
Successful Right Wing government have a Tolerant and Active electorate, who will be able to control their instincts towards people who do things that they themselves may not like.
The problem with many of the Bad
Re:They already did (Score:4, Informative)
No, Do mind. Its a matter of public record that the Judge and a number of prosecutors fabricated the charges to stop him running the 2018 election. And this isn't some whacky conspiracy theory, the correspondance where they discuss this was leaked , and confirmed, and lead to the Supreme court throwing all the convictions out *with prejudice* and declaring the prosecution to be corrupt and a miscarriage of justice.
And yes while Jair Bolsonaro's attacker was 'left wing', you omit the more important detail, that he was a paranoid schizophrenic who attacked Bolsonaro because "God" told him to do it.
Details matter.
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Bzzzt, thank you for playing.
The US, for well over a century, has supported dictators. And sent in troops to support them (like Woodrow Wilson, and Ike).
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No. If you look at some other countries, the presence of fossil fuels was rarely shared with the people as a whole, and the people who benefited were only those who managed to be granted the extraction rights. Especially in some countries where this divide between the rich minority and the poor majority has had major conflicts or led to civil wars. Fertilizer requires energy, not fossil fuels, as you can make fertilizer from the nitrogen in the air.
He is also not banning fossil fuels outright. He wants a g
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Or maybe Columbia will secure its future with renewable energy and exports.
Even the Saudis know it's only a matter of time, and are trying to diversify.
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Or maybe Columbia will secure its future with renewable energy and exports.
BWA HAH HA HAH HAH AH AH H AH AHAHAH.
Oh you were serious.
Curious how you plan to mine all the materials needed for solar panels and wind farms without oil.
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Or maybe Columbia will secure its future with renewable energy and exports.
You can't put electricity on a tanker.
They could build transmission lines to their neighbors but their neighbors are poor and would be better off building their own renewables.
Colombia is cloudy, so solar is unlikely to be competitive. The latitude is not favorable for wind.
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That pretty much ensures a lot of Columbian citizens will be in the ground, too.
Guess he hates fertilizer and food.
Less than 1% of fossil fuels goes to the production of fertilizer. Mind you the sheer amount of bullshit you are spewing into every story this week SuperKendall means we already have found an endless renewable alternative feedstock.
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Food was grown long before there was oil-based fertilizer. For example, using the three-crop rotation system.
Destroy a country to reduce global emissions by 1% (Score:1, Insightful)
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And to make money from Colombia's best export -- cocaine. More unemployment = more youths to exploit in the drug trade.
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Oh noes, not ThE eCoNoMy?!
Because when you look at relatively mild, small storms like Hurricane Catrina, that's been just a totally awesome economic result.
So whenever a country does anything at all to reduce emissions, let's sneer at it and point out how it's useless. While doing nothing. Except maybe mounting another 4+-storey high day-bright advertising TV onto the side of another building to convince us to consume more. Because eCoNoMy.
Infinite growth? Yeah, right.
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Biden totally isn't traveling to Saudi Arabia to kiss the ring and beg for increased OPEC production, either. It's all Putin's fault for high gas prices.
Mod me up, partisan hacks.
Colombia following Venezuela (Score:3, Insightful)
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Maybe following the US and China into an oven is an even worse plan.
The polluters have to be stopped by any means necessary if the biosphere is to continue to support us, assuming it isn't past a tipping point of catastrophic methane release already.
He's gone in 4 years (Score:2, Informative)
This isn't going to happen. From the article:
"Oil and coal exports are Colombia’s largest source of foreign currency and there are fears the price of the peso could drop when the market opens on Tuesday, piling political pressure onto the government to maintain fossil fuel exports."
The guy is gone in 4 years. They will just tie this up in the legislature and in the courts.
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If there is another real election.
This is Colombia we're talking about, not the USA. They are a democracy.
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Re:He's gone in 4 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it's called democracy. How quick some are to blame democracy once someone they disapprove of wins an election.
In the old days, this meant that the rich oil barons would beg the CIA to arrange for a right wing military junta to overthrow the government. These days, hopefully, we stay hands off and stop treating South America like a political board game.
Re:He's gone in 4 years (Score:5, Informative)
Biden's not great, I agree. But a million times better than that criminal Trump. And inflation is not caused by the president, especially when it's world wide.
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Biden's better, but he's not a million times better. He's not doing anything substantive on ecology or economy. And he's just as much of a liar as Trump, arguably more in some ways — Trump kept his campaign promise to lower taxes for the rich. Biden hasn't kept his promises on the minimum wage, or student loans, or frankly anything other than appointing women to positions that will probably cease to exist in a few years anyway when the Republicans take over again because Biden is in fact not fundament
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Central banks across the world follow the lead of the US. The Fed keeping rates low for far too long was imitated across the globe.
In addition, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 literally injected trillions of newly printed dollars into an already rapidly-improving economy. Massive inflation was the natural result. Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary and Obama's one-time National Economic Council chair, even warned as such during the time. Let's not forget that two similarly massive stimulus bills h
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History repeating itself in some ways. Here we have the struggling everyman winning out over the corrupt and brutal elites in power. The Trumpists I would expect should be cheering this on, but instead they're freaking out at the "left of center". It would be nice if even the most cynical could at least think "well, it's their choice, let's see how it plays out"...
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Yes, it's called democracy. How quick some are to blame democracy once someone they disapprove of wins an election.
In the old days, this meant that the rich oil barons would beg the CIA to arrange for a right wing military junta to overthrow the government. These days, hopefully, we stay hands off and stop treating South America like a political board game.
The thing is, what Petro has promised is no approvals for new oil and gas projects. Existing ones and ones currently under construction are fine. This includes the 120 odd new drilling sites approved by his predecessor. The far right nutters love to leave this out.
Petro isn't daft, he knows how dependent the economy is on oil exports, so part of his manifesto is to diversify the economy away from it's reliance on exporting fossil fuels. However he was mainly elected on civil rights grounds rather than en
Re: He's gone in 4 years (Score:2)
Virtue Signaling (Score:1, Insightful)
without plan: the greentard path to poverty (Score:2)
exports are 16% of Columbia's GDP and fossil fuels 56 percent of that (coffee only 6 percent).
Same problem Biden administration has, not enough to cut off fossil, there needs to be a plan to clean energy. Such a plan would have massive use of fossil in the near term to build out a new energy infrastructure, because there is no alternative, 80 percent our energy is from fossil.
You have to give to get.
Not a way to prosperity (Score:2, Troll)
Each country gets the government they deserve, good luck Columbia.
Just what South America needs (Score:1, Insightful)
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It's all patter for the people so you can get elected and be corrupted. Nothing ever changes.
For 2/3rds the planet, environmentalism has been a godsend for corruption, whether dictatorships or nominal democracies lousy with corruption from top to bottom (e.g. Brazil, India, Mexico for some choice large examples). It gets you glowing approval from western countries, function as an election meme so you can keep the gravy train running.
Remember: the downsides of GW pale in comparison to daily life in such p
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It's capitalism, not socialism, that depends on spending other people's money.
In current international politics, though, socialism means you can't depend on exports much at all. Autarky is extremely difficult to pull off. Traditionally, it also means dodging assassins and squelching coup attempts instigated by foreign powers.
HA HA HA !!! (Score:2)
other things he said (Score:2)
"i have more followers than jesus christ"
"anyone living in a home larger than 65 sq meters will have to share it with other families"
"public schools have to tear down every religious figure present"
"anyone renting property needs to pay 25% in taxes"
Foolish. Very foolish (Score:2)
What is needed is NOT to keep O&G in the ground, but to stop BURNING IT. 1/4 to 1/3 of O&G goes into Chemicals. That is what O&G is needed for.
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Imprisoning American oil like that is risky (Score:2)
Smothering it with your soil is grounds for having your freedoms enhanced.
It's a competition (Score:2)
It's a competition with Venezuela for which method of going down the tubes works faster.
OPEC sells Oil in Cryptocurrency (Score:2)
Looking forward to OPEC selling Oil in Cryptocurrency
Venezuela is already doing it https://archive.is/Zdhxe [archive.is]