Breaking Colombia’s Addiction to Crude
ARAUCA, Colombia — Over the past four decades, Colombia has pumped billions of barrels of oil from under a vast savanna it shares with neighboring Venezuela. Through pipelines, the crude travels over the Andes and to the Caribbean coast, and then onto tankers, mostly to the United States.
Much like another famous export of Colombia’s, it has an addictive quality. In the span of a generation, the nation’s economy became dependent on oil revenue.
This year, voters moved to break that habit, electing Colombia’s first leftist president in two centuries of independence, a former guerrilla fighter and environmentalist who wants to phase out oil while heavily taxing coal mining companies.
“What is more poisonous for humanity: cocaine, coal or oil?” President Gustavo Petro asked world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in September. “The opinion of power has ordered that cocaine is poison. But instead, coal and oil must be protected, even when it can extinguish all humanity.”
Mr. Petro, 62, is at the vanguard of a new crop of climate-conscious Latin American leaders. South America and Central America’s political pendulum has swung left, but instead of arguing that extractive economies are needed to fund welfare programs, as many of their socialist contemporaries and predecessors have, Mr. Petro, President Gabriel Boric of Chile and others say fossil fuels have not lifted enough people out of poverty to justify their impact on the climate.
It is a radical proposition, as Colombia is still relatively poor and theoretically has decades more of oil revenue to reap. That money accounts for around a fifth of government income, roughly half of its foreign investment and nearly onetenth of gross domestic product.
Colombia would be the first major oil producing country to stop drilling if Mr. Petro successfully decoupled the national budget from oil money.
“Surmounting the climate crisis means leaving behind the consumption of oil and coal,” he said
at the U.N. climate talks in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. “This means a profound transformation of economies.”
Uncertainty over what will replace Colombia’s oil revenue has already made many wary of Mr. Petro’s vision. In his campaign, he promised to end new permits for oil exploration and impose a windfall tax on oil and coal companies. The concern is mostly economic, as Colombia already generates nearly 80 percent of its energy from renewable sources — mainly hydropower.
The country’s business elite, many of whom are invested in the oil industry, are watching as Colombia’s already weak currency dips further, reacting to Mr. Petro’s proposals, soaring energy prices and global inflation.
“We have to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, yes, but imagine choosing this very moment to do it,” said Óscar Iván Zuluaga, Colombia’s long-serving finance minister, now a businessman in steel-making. “Petro has to take reality into account, not just ideology. That is the basis of governance.”
The specter of economic collapse in Venezuela, where government mismanagement has devastated the economy, shadows Mr. Petro’s plans. More than two million Venezuelans have settled in Colombia in recent years, fleeing destitution.
“With Petro, we can also descend into total chaos,” said Erik Arciniegas, who runs a contracting company that services oil companies in Arauca, where two-thirds of the vote went to Mr. Petro’s opponent.
Mr. Arciniegas stands to lose business under Mr. Petro, but his argument against phasing out oil mirrors one that has gained traction across the developing world.
“The Americans and the Arabs are continuing to benefit from those riches,”
he said. “I don’t understand why we should stop.”
Irene Vélez, the energy and mining minister, and Susana Muhamad, the environment minister, have been assigned with reimagining Colombia’s economy without oil. They see the energy transition as a “gran giro,” or a great turn, that would gradually eliminate oil and coal and reorient
Colombia’s export economy around ecotourism and producing foodstuffs like grain and avocados.
In interviews, neither Ms. Vélez, Ms. Muhamad nor Mr. Petro’s vice president, Francia Márquez, would fully recommit to the campaign pledge of stopping new oil permits, saying that consultations on that plan were still underway. After protests organized in part by oil companies, Mr. Petro tweeted reassurances that oil production and exploration were still “continuing normally.”
Climate activists are hoping that Mr. Petro will follow through on his promises.
“I’m not naïve, but I am excited,” Maria Laura Rojas, a co-founder of the environmental organization Transforma, said. “Colombia should be a laboratory for Latin America’s energy transition, and Latin America for the world’s.”
Even Mr. Petro’s opponents mostly wish him well. At a protest in Arauca spearheaded by Mr. Arciniegas, the contractor, there were no denunciations of Mr. Petro.
“La reforma sí, pero no así,” went one. “Yes to reform, but not in this form.”
Bruce MacMaster, the president of the National Business Association, said he supported Mr. Petro’s energy transition plans, but it would be better if Mr. Petro convinced the major industrial nations to change their ways first.
“The United States, Europe, China, India — the future of the world depends on their leadership,” Mr. MacMaster said. “May Petro be their prophet. God knows we have lacked one on this issue.”