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