Of Fracking and Bullfighting

Is this Colombian animals' biggest problem? A Colombian bullfighter at work
this February in Bogotá's Santamaria Plaza.

Recently, there's been lots of critism to two activites in Colombia: fracking and bullfighting.

Fracking

Both are questionable for different reasons. Fracking, which releases hydrocarbons by fracturing underground rock formations, can pollute water resources and cause minor earthquakes, according to critics.

And bullfighting seems like a holdover from the Dark Ages, which should have died out along with
witch burning and gladiator battles. Bullfighting is also cruel. And, making entertainmet out of killing an animal can only bring out the worst in spectators.

Nothing else to protest? Marching against
bullfighting in downtown Bogotá.

In recent months, fracking's opponents have lobbied, filed lawsuits and written opinion pieces calling for the procedure to be banned in Colombia.

And bullfighting's opponents have for years battled - futilely - in the streets, courtrooms and Congress to have the practice prohibited.

But fracking and bullfighting are only tips of the iceberg of the larger phenomena of the fossil fuel industry and animal mistreatment. Yes, fracking causes environmental damage, but so do the conventional oil and coal industries: they trigger deforestation, drive climate change, pollute the seas and poison the air when burnt. The oil shipping industry, like all shipping, damages marine life with noise, by transporting exotic animals and by collisions with marine mammals. In short, the fossil fuel industry's impacts are innumerable, and fracking is just a tiny part of that.

Is it fracking, or just oil? A  seabird dirtied by
spilled oil doesn't care where that oil came from.

And if bullfighting is cruel, practices such as cockfighting and factory farming are much crueler and affect many more animals.

But fracking, like GMOs, gets attacked because it seems new, strange and sinister.

And bullfighting represents many things despised by its leftist opponents: the wealthy, Mayor Peñalosa and the traditional landowning class.

And while both fracking and bullfighting are very questionable activities, the danger is that by obsessing with these two narrow issues, activists ignore the wider problems. And, if they actually win these two battles, they may feel that the larger battle is won and they can cease fighting.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Dead Jaguar's Lesson

The leaking well killed thousands of animals,
but not this jaguar - at least directly.

During the recent oil well leak in Santander, a photo went viral of animals killed by the spill, including a jaguar. The image illustrated the  spill's deadly impacts.

It turned out, however, that the jaguar had not been killed by the oil spill, but rather hit by a motor vehicle.

The miss-marketing of the jaguar's death should not detract from the scale of the environmental damage from the oil spill, which killed thousands of animals, most of them fish, but also birds, amphibians and others.

But in a broader sense, oil did kill the jaguar.

Actually, thousands of animals were killed.

After all, the vehicle which hit it was almost certainly oil-powered. And the road the jaguar was crossing was likely paved with oil products and built to carry oil-powered vehicles. At the same time, the deforestation caused in part by oil drilling has driven wild animals out of their traditional habitats and into conflicts with people - and their vehicles.

And if the oil is not spilled and gets burned as planned, it will pump pollutants into the atmosphere which will harm the health of humans and jaguars,

When will Colombia escape from its oil addiction?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Real Scandals Behind the Oil Spill

Spilled out from Ecopetrol's Lizama 158 well poisons a nearby stream. (Photo: Vanguardia Liberal)

An abandoned oil well pouring out petroleum since the beginning of this month has generated angry headlines about animals killed, fishermen out of work and residents sickened. But the real scandal may be state oil company EcoPetrol's alleged irresponsible handling of its exhausted wells.

The Lizama 158 oil well in Santander Department has been pouring out oil, much of it into a nearby river, since the start of March. At least 550 barrels of oil - according to the company - and perhaps as many as 23,000 barrels - according to the National Environmental Licensing Agency (ANLA) - have spilled out.

Ecopetrol has speculated that a nearby tectonic shift could have triggered the leak. But whatever the immediate cause of this spill, the press scrutiny has exposed a much larger scandal. According to multiple Controlaria reports, Ecopetrol frequently failed to seal exhausted oil wells, leaving the wells a threat to pour petroleum onto their surroundings.

How many times will this disaster be repeated? How many Ecopetrol wells are leaking away into the jungle?

The accompanying scandal here is the, despite the repeated Controlaria reports, apparently no government enforcement entity bothered to force Ecopetrol to obey the law.

How many other environmental regulations are being ignored, setting the scene for future disasters?

It's worth pointing out, too, that even when it's not spilled into the jungle, oil is an environmental disaster all along its life cycle: Even the cleanest oil wells often require road and pipeline construction, opening the wilderness to farmers and deforestation.

And the oil that is processed 'correctly' will ultimately be burned, polluting the air and contributing to global warming.

The best solution for the environment is not to finally seal well Lizama 158, but to end our addiction to oil.

Meanwhile, yesterday El Espectador printed this impactful article about Colombia's worst environmental disasters. As the paper points out, the leaking oil well is a minor disaster compared to Colombia's terrible deforestation rate, the innumerable rivers destroyed by illegal mining, and the Ciénaga Grande, a wetland on the Caribbean coast, is being steadily killed by roads, dikes and canals.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Doubling Down on Climate Change

The World Bank will stop financing oil and natural gas prospecting and drilling projects after 2019, but Colombia's oil industry vows that won't slow its exploitation of the dirtiest sorts of hydrocarbons.

So, even tho Colombia will be hard hit by climate change: it will lose biodiversity, coffee-growing regions will suffer, its glaciers will melt and the city of Cartagena may be left as an island - its oil sector sees no reason to reduce its contribution to that crisis.

That means investing some US $42 billion over the next two decades, say oil industry officials to drill

Colombia's non-conventional hydrocarbons
are in some of its most biodiverse regions.

some 7,000 new wells and perhaps double Colombia's new hydrocarbon production by increasing controversial methods such as fracking, which some experts warn threatens Colombia's water supply.

'Colombia doesn't have the luxury of leaving these resources in the ground,' the El Espectador newspaper writes, in what sounds like a quote from an oil executive.

Unfortunately, the cost of pumping out these resources, in lost biodiversity and natural areas, and particularly in destruction from climate change, may far outweigh its oil income. But nobody appears to be considering that side of the balance sheet.

Colombia can't stop climate change on its own - and it may in fact be way too late to stop it at all. But once it really gets going, Colombia will have nobody to blame but itself.

And many of the non-conventional resource blocks overlap indigenous territories.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Combustible Concept: Stop Subsidizing Fuel Prices

A traffic jam shuts down Calle 26. Would charging the real price for gasoline and diesel
reduce congestion and clean up the air?

The idea seemed sensible enough: Create a fund to stabilize gasoline and diesel prices. When international prices were low, Colombian prices would be raised, contributing to the fund. When prices rose, money would be withdrawn from the fund to reduce the price at the pump.

That was the idea. But in practice, the fund has been used mostly to stabilize prices downward, to buy voters and pacify strike-prone truckers.

EcoPetror: Not so green, and
maybe someday bankrupt, too.

However, the fuel subsidy is costing EcoPetrol a trillion pesos per year, threatening its economic health. And, such subsidies disproporionately benefit the wealth and businesses, who consume much more gasoline than do poor people. They also increase air pollution and violate Colombia's promises in the Paris anti-climate change agreement.

Colombia's Controlaria recommends freeing up gasoline prices. Colombia doesn't subsidize books, apples or clothing - so, why vehicle fuels?

I just talked to a schoolteacher from Medellin who had come to Bogotá to participate in the protest marches. She told me that public school teachers often must reach into their own pockets to purchase cleaning supplies for the school and even food for the children.

"That's the government's responsibility, and they've got plenty of money to throw around," she said, accusing government officials of corruption.

The government has offered teachers only a 2,000 peso-per-month raise, she added.

Certainly, the billions of dollars thrown away on fuel subsidies could have gone a long way toward helping public school students.

'No resources for teachers,' says Santos - except maybe those millions and millions wasted subsidizing gasoline.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Colombia's Climate Contradictions

Congested cars on Calle 26 pump carbon dioxide into the air. Colombians buy more than 20,000 new cars per month.

Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to international cooperation, to the United States' image and to the planet's future by withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord.

However, judging by the climate policies of the rest of the world, including Colombia, which is supposedly sticking with the accord, the agreement is headed for failure, anyway.

Colombia seems like a good example of this:

The country signed the Paris agreement, but has proceeded to enthusiastically dig as many fossil fuels

Colombian oil production, in red, and consumption, in black.
(Chart: Wikipedia.)

out of the ground as possible. Colombia's production of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, is still growing fast, and oil production may level off only because they can't find more of it.

Ecopetrol's Reficar Cartagena refinery complex,
recently expanded.

The country also made a major long-term investment in the fossil fuels industry by modernizing Ecopetrol's Reficar refinery in Cartagena, a project which went $6 billion over budget, spurring corruption investigations.

Meanwhile, Colombian car ownership is booming, and deforestation rages on.

Still, Colombia is doing well compared to many other oil producers, particularly its neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela, both of which subsidize the price of gasoline and other energy forms, essentially paying people to waste energy. Venezuelan car owners pay only about one U.S. penny per liter to fill their tanks, but that hasn't stopped Caracas from signing the Paris agreement or lecturing developed countries about their environmental policies. Nor do other oil producers, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran, see any contradiction between signing the Paris agreement and producing oil and subsidizing its consumption.

Colombia also subsidizes its gasoline, though much less than does Venezuela.

Colombia is also said to be one of the world's most vulnerable nations to climate change.

World car sales are rising, and almost all of them burn fossil fuels.
(Chart: Andemos)

Needless to say, the world would be better off in many ways, besides in climate change terms, if it cut back on fossil fuel consumption: the air would be cleaner, cities would be quieter and more liveable, and people would likely get more exercise, from walking and bicycling. And fewer forests would be cleared.

Trump has squandered the U.S.'s leadership and moral standing as well as the planet's environmental future in return for a few votes and donations from fossil fuel producers. But at least give him credit for honesty. Trump withdrew from the climate agreement, instead of leaving the U.S. on the list while pursuing environmentally poisonous policies.

However, the danger now is that the rest of the world will use Trump as a convenient whipping boy, and an excuse not to act themselves.

Higher and higher: Colombian coal production. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel,
and Colobmia is producing more and more of it.
(Chart: Wikipedia)

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Colombia's Oil Addiction

Articles in El Tiempo call for more investment in
petroleum production.

Colombia is not often seen as a petroleum state like its neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela. Yet, until oil prices tanked, Colombia earned more than half of its foreign exchange income from petroleum exports. And oil provided a big chunk of government royalties - money that Colombia is desperate for to pay the costs of the peace deal to be voted on Nov. 2.

However, oil has brought big environmental costs, and produced relatively few jobs.

Now that petroleum's price dive has demonstrated the danger of relying on commodity exports, Colombia's response is simple: Double down on oil.

EcoPetrol's headquarters building in
Bogotá. The company's mascot
is an iguana.

El Tiempo has run a series of stories emphasizing the need to boost oil production with subsidies and tax breaks, neglecting to mention that these subsidies also benefit some of the nation's wealthiest men and corporations.

Nor is the newspaper or the government bothered by the contradiction between their dire warnings about the effects of oil-driven climate change and promises that Colombia will do its part, and the nation's oily ambitions.

I read recently that Colombia has only 7 years of petroleum reserves at the rate that it's pumping them out. Undoubtedly, they can extend those with more prospecting, but in the end it's probably a losing race.

There's also a vicious cycle (another type of tragedy of the commons) involved in the race to pump

An electric tax. Bogotá has exactly 43 of them on the streets,
according to El Tiempo.
(Photo: Ministry of the Environment)

more oil, which many other producers are also engaged in. The more oil producers pump to compensate for low prices, the lower prices will drop, making production gains valueless.

Colombia should instead direct subsidies toward manufacturing, which employs lots of people and is more sustainable in the long run. (And would produce employment for ex-guerrillas who may not want to become poor farmers.) It should also make real efforts to shift toward more efficient and oil-free energy in transportation and industry.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Tough Times for EcoPetrol

A sick iguana?

The price of its main product has plummeted, its reserves are declining, and it's embroiled in a corruption scandal.

These are tough times for Colombia's national oil company, EcoPetrol.

Any company would be devastated if the value of its principle product suddenly dropped by more than half. But the plummeting world oil price comes at an already difficult time for EcoPetrol, which, along with associated private companies, pumps the great majority of Colombia's oil. And oil until recently generated most of Colombia's export revenue.

Colombia's oil reserves - the petroleum underground which could be profitably drilled - is shrinking because of scarce new discoveries. And the plummeting oil price has caused EcoPetrol to slash its exploration budget, meaning that even less new oil will likely be found.

Colombian oil potential during the 1990s.
Things are no longer so rosy.

At the same time, the emblematic Colombian company is embroiled in a mushrooming bribery scandal. Executives of a United States oil services company, PetroTiger, allegedly paid bribes to an EcoPetrol executive's wife in an attempt to obtain valuable contracts.

PetroTiger's founders have been indicted in a U.S. federal court. One of them, as well as a company lawyer, have plead guilty, but the other founder is fighting the charges.

However, the PetroTiger affair may be only the tip of a corruption iceberg inside EcoPetrol, according to news reports.

EcoPetrol's stock value, which had soared about 5,000 pesos in 2013, has dropped to around 2,000 pesos.

The national oil company's troubles have major implications for Colombia's economy, which will lose several points of GDP, as well as its peace process, which requires huge investments to demobilize guerrilla fighters and compensate victims.

Colombia will muddle thru this economic hit, (altho neighbor Venezuela may not be so lucky). But the episode contains valuable - and obvious - lessons, such as 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket,' and 'Develop a diversified economy not based on exporting raw materials.'

That way, Colombia might save its economy - and its environment as well.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Colombia's Oil Crisis

Just a few weeks ago, when Bogotá announced the astronomical cost of its planned subway, experts said the city couldn't pay for it without cutting back on other major projects or lots of money from the national government.

Since then, the nation's financial prospects have gone south.

While Colombia is not often thot of as an oil exporter, it is. In October, in fact, Colombian petroleum production averaged 1 million barrels per day - almost one-third the production of neighbor Venezuela and more than double the production of Ecuador, both OPEC members.

As a result, the global drop in oil and gasoline prices which has drivers celebrating is bad news for the environment, urban liveability - and for Bogotá's prospects for building a subway.

To be clear, Bogotá's subway plan is exactly the worst possible way to build mass transit. Burying its train system undergound will mean slower construction and higher cost. Bogotá would get much more transit for its money by building either a surface level or an elevated train track, while meanwhile expanding the TransMilenio system and creating more bus-only lanes.

But city leaders appear fixated on the most expensive, underground alternative - which makes one wonder whether some hidden agenda's at work.

However, swooning world oil prices could make the subway, which would require central government financing, an impossibility.

Colombia is not a major world oil producer, but it nevertheless gets between 40% and 50% of its export revenue comes from oil (and more from gas and coal), far more than Colombia's iconic export, coffee. Ecopetrol, the state oil company, has long been a national cash cow.

The global oil price decline, which is likely to last for reasons detailed below, means a several-point drop in Colombia's GDP, For reasons detailed below, oil prices are likely to stay low for a good while, forcing Colombia to either find new sources of income, or cut its budget.

Less revenue will mean less money for schools, police, parks, health care and big infrastructure projects such as Bogotá's planned metro. And there's little Colombia can do about it. If Colombia attempts to export more oil, as other petroleum producers are doing, it will only push world prices down further.

What Colombia could do is diversify its economy, and replace raw materials with manufactured goods, which put lots more money into workers' hands and are less subject to price fluctuations. I am perpetually amazed that Colombia, with its cheap labor and resources, still imports things like clothing from China.

Unlike previous oil price drops, this one shows no sign of reversing anytime soon. China's economic growth is slowing and Europe seems stuck in recession. Meanwhile, Iraq and Libya are returning to oil production, and the planet's swing producer, Saudi Arabia, gives no sign of closing the tap. The Saudis are probably using oil as a weapon, since their arch-enemy Iran's oil is more expensive to pump out of the ground and refine. Lower world prices will also make marginal wells in places like Canada unprofitable, reducing production in the long run. (And Venezuela will get hit even harder.)

Venezuelan Pres. Nicolas Maduro rants against "savage" fracking techniques, because they threaten his nation's insane, populist spending, including giving away free gasoline. I wonder whether he means 'savage' in contrast to gentle, civilized traditional oil production methods involving deforesting rainforest, setting off explosives underground, drilling holes deep into the earth and then burning that petroleum in the atmosphere?

At the same time that Middle Eastern countries are racing to pump their oil, the U.S. is moving whole hog into fracking, creating an production boom there. The fracking boom looks only likely to expand to places like England and Colombia, and inevitably China and Russia. That may mean 'Game Over' for Planet Earth's climate, but before that happens it'll devastate lots of oil producers' budgets, and put lots of infrastructure projects on hold

To escape this trap, Colombia needs to diversify its economy from raw materials.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Protesting Against a Pipeline

Protesting on the front steps of EcoPetrol.

As the Santos administration charges ahead with its plans to make Colombia a big exporter of oil, coal and other natural resources, more than a few rural communities and natural wonders are getting trampled on.

For the most part, I suspect, we never hear from those victims.

But today a group of people from Puente Nacional in Santander Department showed up on the doorstep of EcoPetrol to protest against the construction of a new pipeline and pumping station would cause what they consider to be a sort of ecocide.

Countryside near Puente Nacional,
Santander Dept.
(Photo: PuenteNacional.com)

According to the protesters, the construction of the 8-kilometer-long pipeline will mean cutting down some 3,000 trees along a path 33 meters wide. The pipeline's track will damage 14 streams, as well as wetlands, the critics say.

While this is a small environmental attack, I suspect that it's being repeated in similar ways across Colombia and the rest of the continent.

But few of the human victims - and none of the trees - have the resources and sophistication to protest on Facebook and on the front steps of Ecopetrol.

An anti-oil drilling mural
on Calle 26 in Bogotá.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Humans Discover the Olinguito - and Condemn It?

An olinguito. (Photo: Smithsonian Magazine)

This week, the Smithsonian Institution announced the 'discovery' of a new species of carnivorous mammal, related to the raccoon, native to the cloud forests of Ecuador and Colombia. It's the first new carnivore species to be identified in the past 35 years.

Indigenous people walk thru Yasuni National Park.
Will oil drilling devastate their culture? 

Except that the olinguito isn't really new. Specimens had been studied in laboratories and even kept in zoos - where the keepers couldn't understand why they weren't interested in mating with other with their zoo companions. It turned out that zoologists had been confusing the olinguito with other, species in the olingo genus.

Ecuador's Yasuni National Park,
on the Colombian border.

Humans' tardy realization that the olinguitos were a distinct species in the olingo genus probably doesn't matter as much to the olinguitos as do peoples' other activities - their invasion and deforestation of the olinguitos' cloud forest habitat. Almost half of the little animals' habitat has already been destroyed by agriculture and urban development.

And that trend looks to accelerate with Ecuador's decision this week to open its vast Yasuni National Park to oil drilling. The park, which covers 9,820 square kilometers may be one of the most biodiverse places on earth, according to Wikipedia. In a single hectare, it has as many insect species as all of North America, as well as myriad bats, amphibians and mammals. Several groups of indigenous people also inhabit the park, living in voluntary isolation from outsiders.

How much impact? Mining titles
awarded by Colombian departments. 

But the park, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, also close to a billion barrels of oil. In 2007, the Ecuadorean government offered to leave that oil underground if other countries would pay Ecuador half of the oil's value, or more than 3 billion dollars. But Ecuador received only $13 million and more than $100 million in pledges.

"The world has failed us," Ecuadorean Pres. Rafael Correa said this week, and criticized rich countries' "hypocrisy."

Yasuni National Park at nightfall.
(Photo: Understory.ran)

Correa is right, of course. But one can also criticize Correa's policies as short-sighted and selfish. When it is burned, the oil will pump hundreds of millions of tons of global warming gases into the atmosphere, making Ecuador, a member of OPEC, even more of an accomplice in climate change. The drilling work will also trigger wide pollution and deforestation.

I don't think that the olinguito, which inhabits high-altitude regions, lives in Yasuni park. But Ecuador's decision is only the beginning of wider oil exploration and mining across the Amazon. Ecuador, in fact, is also opening huge areas adjoining the park to oil drilling. And Colombia, naturally, is opening its own wilderness areas to resource exploitation. (Coincidentally, this week Nicaragua also announced that it will open sea waters awarded to it last year by an international court to oil exploration. The waters are disputed by Colombia, which had barred oil exploration from the region, which contains the largest barrier reef in the Americas.)

A waterfall in Yasuni National Park.
(Photo: Sense and Sustainability)

Matt Finer of the Center for International Environmental Law told Britain's Guardian newspaper that Ecuador's decision was "deeply disappointing..."The Yasuni-ITT Initiative was the lone exception to the relentless expansion of hydrocarbon projects deeper into the most remote tracts of the western Amazon. Now there is really no viable alternative to stop the wave of drilling slated for the most biodiverse region of the world."

The olinguito may have entered human awareness only to be soon driven to extinction by human greed. And with it will go many other species still unknown to humanity.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Weird, Weird Web Around Amazon Oil

It's like something from a spy novel, involving a man nicknamed Dr. Death, the Vietnam War, jungle oil reserves and possible ties to cocaine smuggling and the CIA.

The tale begins with MontcoEnergy LC, a previously unknown oil company, which was assigned five petroleum exploration regions last year by Colombia's National Hydrocarbon Agency (ANH). However, in a statement this May, the ANH said, mysteriously, that it had reversed its decision "for reasons anticipated in the law." The statement added that "the relevant authorities have been apprised of this situation."

A Colombian oil well. 

Good for the ANH. But perhaps they should have known this from the start. After all, Montco apparently does not even have a working website. So, can they really be trusted with a chunk of Colombia's biodiversity and energy resources?

Then the story becomes even more dubious. La Silla Vacia reports that a Canadian oil company  investigated Montco and found that the company's records weren't in order. And that ANH officials discovered that Montco's supposed offices in Texas and Canada were just post office boxes and that an oil well which Montco claimed to own in the small west African nation of Gabon apparently does not exist. A Gabonese official says that his signature on documents provided by Montco is forged.

Now the tale turns sinister: Also according to La Silla Vacia, two of Montco's three owners are linked, thru another oil company they own, to a narcotrafficker named Chupeta. El Tiempo reports other contacts between Montco and shady characters.

Weirdest of all, Montco hasn't given up on getting oil exploration rights. And the guy representing the company in Colombia is David Scott Weekly, who earned the nickname Dr. Death by carrying out special operations in southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

Weekly has also been linked to the CIA in news reports, altho the CIA denies this.

What's behind all of this? An unknown company with dubious associations offers millions of dollars for Colombian oil prospecting rights and hires a Dr. Death to lobby for it.

It also so happens that lots of Colombian cocaine passes thru West Africa on its way to Europe, altho apparently little thru Gabon.

All of which suggests where these millions of dollars might have come from.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Renewable Colombia?

The Jepirachi windfarm on the La Guajira peninsula

Colombia's record-breaking flooding coincided with the Cancun conference on global warming, providing a great excuse to talk about Colombia's potential as a renewable energy producer.

Two long coasts mean wave, tidal current and possibly even wind energy, lots of sunlight (although lots of clouds), lots of biomass and even volcanic activity, Colombia has little excuse not to exploit its huge renewable energy potential.


A recent report by Colombia's Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Inter-American Development Bank found that Colombia had potential for more than 46 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, including 25 GW of small hydroelectric projects and 21 GW of windpower, as well as solar, biomass and geothermal. (How much is a gigawatt? Enough to power 750,000 homes in the U.S., and many more in Colombia.) Right now, Colombia produces a tiny 1.5% of its energy from renewable sources and hopes to expand that only to 3.5% by 2015 and 6.5% by 2020. (The Colombian government defines only small hydro projects as 'renewable,' while in fact 80% of its electrical generating capacity is hydropower.)

There's lots of good reasons why Colombia could be a pioneer in renewable energy, use it to replace fossil fuels and provide reliable power to remote regions where the power grid doesn't reach. Colombia could even start exporting renewable energy technology. South Africa appears to be doing that. It's also in Colombia's interests: government officials have blamed this year's disastrous floods on global warming, and warming is predicted to melt Colombia's glaciers and destroy much of its wetlands.

The development bank report recommended that Colombia institute policies to promote renewable energy generation, such as guaranteeing markets and stable prices.

Instead, however, Colombia is going full bore for old-fashioned fossil fuel exploitation, meaning oil, natural gas and coal. Fossil fuels are not only terrible for the environment; in the long term, they could undermine the nation's economy, institutionalizing corruption, economic instability and even authoritarianism, as has happened in many big petroleum exporters, including neighboring Venezuela.

A concrete example: the other day I talked to a Mexican textile trader who used to import cloth from Colombia. But Colombia's peso has risen so much that it's cheaper to import from India and China. (Why Mexico can't competitively make its own textiles is another issue.) The peso's rise is in great degree due to investment in the fossil fuel extraction sector. So, the jobs-scarce fossil fuel industry is hurting the jobs-instensive textiles industry. Not only that, but resource extraction industries are also notorious for generating corruption and financing outlaw organizations. A case in point is Occidental Petroleum's Caño Limon pipeline near the Venezuelan border, which used to be bombed regularly by the ELN guerrillas whenever they weren't satisfied with their protection payments. More oil, coal and natural gas exports might just make Colombia into another Venezuela, which exports petroleum and imports everything else.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogota Bike Tours

Colombia's Carbonized Future

Historically, Colombia hasn't pumped a tremendous amount of carbon into our atmosphere - two of the nation's traditional exports, coffee and emeralds, are relatively benign. Recently, Yale and Columbia universities even ranked Colombia tenth in the world for environmental sustainability. In 2007, Colombia's carbon output was only 1.4 tons per-capita, much less than Ecuador's 2.4 tons and only a fraction of Venezuela's 2006 output of 6.4 tons.

But, thanks to increased security across the country, Colombia plans to dramatically increase its coal and petroleum production over the next few years. And, even if Colombia exports nearly all of that oil and coal, just the getting it out of the ground will mean lots of destroyed jungle - and even more when campesinos use those oil company-built roads and pipeline routes to invade and deforest more areas.

Once Colombia's oil and coal money start flowing, will politicians yield to short-term temptation and buy votes by subsidizing gasoline prices, as Ecuador and Venezuela have done, with disastrous environmental and social effects? Or, will it store the money away, as Norway has done, and use it to finance long-term needs like education, infrastructure and environmental protection, which really build a country?

Colombia will also have to take care to avoid the pernicous effects of raw material exports on its economy and delicate democracy. To see the alternative, all Colombians need to do is look east, where oil-rich Venezuela suffers high poverty and inflation and is sliding deeper and deeper into authoritarianism.

Written by Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours and Rentals