Colombia President Gustavo Petro Wants to Ditch Fossil Fuels

The location for my Dec. 3 interview with Colombian President Gustavo Petro is organized with all of the formalities of a bilateral assembly between heads of presidency. Workers have organized his seat on the patio of a luxurious beachside lodge in Dubai to fastidiously keep away from the solar and positioned a Colombian flag on the close by desk. Males with earpieces linger within the background.  

However from the second he walks in, Petro dispatches with the decorum. He’s wearing a crisp white shirt, denims, and loafers—no tie, no jacket. And he has no persistence for the diplomatic speaking factors that officers usually ship from such a publish. Local weather change is a matter of “life and dying,” he says, and the time has come for nations to maneuver previous their slim self curiosity and antiquated market-based insurance policies. “The presidents come to make some prefabricated speeches that they themselves don’t write, usually, that introduce what I might name a ‘appropriate’ coverage,” he says. “That ‘appropriate’ coverage is fake.” 

The proper coverage, in Petro’s view, is to ditch fossil fuels. And he’s positioning Colombia not solely as a key advocate for the worldwide power transition but additionally as a check case of how a fossil-fuel-producing nation can decarbonize. “What I’m proposing will not be leaping right into a void, as some denialist voices say,” he says. “Moderately, it’s a change in the way in which ahead. A method ahead which, from my viewpoint, may be way more highly effective, and affluent, than the trail that we might be abandoning.”

As fossil-fuel pursuits, at each the company and nationwide ranges, proceed to withstand the transition to scrub power, Petro may provide a robust rebuke, displaying how an economic system can remodel and prosper. Now, he simply has to ship.

Local weather change is nothing new for Petro, who has labored on the difficulty for many years and made it a key plank of his presidential marketing campaign final 12 months. In his 12 months and a half in workplace, he has blocked new oil-and-gas drilling and begun a marketing campaign to floor the economic system to its “organic wealth” reasonably than its fossil-fuel wealth.

His worldwide advocacy on the difficulty comes at an necessary second. Fossil fuels have been on the middle of the worldwide local weather agenda at COP28, the United Nations local weather convention now in its closing hours in Dubai, and people conversations have rankled a few of the greatest fossil-fuel producers whose economies depend upon income from the trade. 

Colombia affords an necessary counter narrative. Regardless that it’s the world’s fifth-largest exporter of coal and an oil-and-gas producer with vital untapped reserves, Colombian negotiators have pushed for aggressive language on fossil fuels, making them a number one voice within the fraught talks. And, whereas on the town, Petro himself endorsed a name for a Fossil Gasoline Non-Proliferation Treaty, a proposal up to now shepherded by civil society and small island states, that would supply a concrete pathway for nations to wind down fossil fuels. He’s the primary chief of a big nation and the primary of a fossil fuel-producing nation to take action. “For about 40 years now, we have now been residing from exporting that coal and that oil,” he says. “But I’ve wished to say, first to Colombian society, and now to the world, that even below these circumstances the economic system ought to transition to decarbonization.”

With out listening carefully, this may all appear a bit radical. Petro, a former guerrilla motion member turned left-wing economist, spooked the markets when he was elected president final 12 months. And in our dialog he stays true to his roots, citing Marx and delivering a critique of the prevailing financial literature on easy methods to deal with local weather change. Market-based approaches, like a carbon tax, are “kind of just like the spiritual anticipating the miracle,” he says. And he says that wealth from carbon-intensive commodities is concentrated among the many rich, posing a political barrier to local weather coverage. “Human life may be saved if the whole wealth held by the richest 1% falls. And that gained’t occur by market mechanisms,” he says.

However his proposals aren’t completely divorced from the standard knowledge. Certainly, he has discovered methods to sq. the market-based order together with his socialist roots. Amongst different concepts, Petro has proposed utilizing the multilateral monetary establishments just like the World Financial institution and Worldwide Financial Fund to scale back the debt of low- and middle-income nations in change for safeguarding nature and, in flip, slowing local weather change. “Capitalism has the monetary system as a central node, which in a sure method is for planning,” he says. “And one should enchantment to it to emerge from the disaster.” Purposes of such an strategy, like these debt-for-nature swaps, have vital buy-in throughout the globe, although the satan is within the particulars about easy methods to construction them. 

As for what he plans to do at residence, Petro’s local weather program sounds a bit like the opposite spending applications which have swept the globe, together with Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. At COP28, he introduced $32 billion in tasks to advance inexperienced transportation, clear power, and local weather adaptation, amongst different issues.  

In some ways, Petro is a singular determine. Regardless of his populist agenda, he speaks extra like a philosopher-economist than a firebrand. He manages good relations with different leaders and policymakers who don’t share his ideologies. And his local weather advocacy stands other than a lot of his left-wing counterparts in Latin America who take an old-school strategy and see fossil fuel-created wealth as a necessary source of finance for social providers. 

Petro tries to look ahead. He expresses concern about “barbarism” that may be triggered by local weather change and the ensuing migration. And he fears the potential of right-wing backlash from associated political disruptions. “There may be this rational path ahead,” he says. “It’s a query of tapping into the situations of human rationality that exist at present, below, undoubtedly, dominant political influences, and making an attempt, with planning and shortly, to make the transition to a different method of manufacturing.”

However as a lot as Petro is an outlier, his strategy to local weather could also be a harbinger of what’s to come back. At CO28, we are able to already see this transformation occurring. After shut to a few a long time of negotiators ignoring fossil fuels of their local weather agreements, a worldwide consensus to section them out is now in play. Petro is only one a part of that shift, however, as local weather change and the havoc it wreaks grow to be extra pressing, it’s certain to create a brand new technology of leaders who take into consideration the difficulty in another way.