Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of From a Climate Correspondent, a newsletter exploring the climate crisis around the globe.
We are four environmental journalists who have, for various reasons, found ourselves working in regions outside our home continent.
We will be sharing personal reflections on the fight against climate change, highlighting key science and policy developments, and sharing some of the best local and international environmental journalism from the regions where we live – namely Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and South Asia.
Thanks for reading!
From a Climate Correspondent team - India, Jocelyn, Lou and Mat
Oil in Costa Rica
Letter no.11 by Jocelyn Timperley, San José
Claudia Dobles Camargo, Costa Rica's first lady, speaking at an event in San José marking the one year update on the country's 2050 decarbonisation plan on 24/2/2020.
“Imagine it: natural gas and petroleum by Ticos for Ticos…. Let’s take advantage of our Costa Rican energy sources.”
The ad promoting a national referendum on oil and gas exploration in a country famed in climate circles for its ban on this very thing blares out on the radio. It makes my heart sink, although the irony that I am at that moment driving along in my recently acquired, definitely-not-electric car doesn’t escape me.
Costa Rica is one of a handful of countries to have implemented a ban of some kind of fossil fuel extraction. Its moratorium on both exploration or extraction began back in 2002 and was extended last February up to 2050.
But in September, a court authorised a small group of activists to gather signatures for a referendum on the policy. With no strong oil and gas industry to speak of in Costa Rica, the referendum push is being led by a chemical engineer from the Costa Rica Institute of Technology called Carlos Roldan. He argues oil and gas exploitation is of national interest and will generate employment. In a nod to the importance Costa Ricans give to their national parks and protected areas, the proposal still prohibits exploration in these areas.#
5% of the electoral registry - around 169,000 signatures - are needed before April to call the national referendum, which would be only the second in Costa Rica’s history. Signatures are being collected in person around 100 sites around the country. It’s by no means certain they will reach the threshold, that a referendum would pass, nor that oil and gas extraction would provide economically or logistically feasible in any case.
But, still, the threat is there.
The ads have made me think about the attachment to fossil fuel extraction in other climate progressive nations, including my own, Scotland, where new licences are still being granted for new North Sea oil and gas exploration.
Even for small fossil fuel producers on the global stage, it seems to me that climate progressive countries banning fossil fuel extraction is an important part of building a wider global picture of rejecting fossil fuels, building what researcher Fergus Green calls “anti-fossil fuel norms”.
Cars cars cars
The flip side of it all, of course, is that Costa Rica still actually uses a fair bit of oil, all of it imported.
Costa Rica famously runs on close to 100% renewable electricity; largely hydro but increasingly geothermal and wind. But its transport sector is another matter. It has been slow to wean itself off petrol cars. Despite doubling the number of electric cars on its roads last year they still number only around 1,000 in total: roughly 0.06% of its fleet. Car ownership overall increased 3.4% between 2017 and 2018.
With 61% of energy use in Costa Rica coming from transport in 2018, this is one of the biggest challenges it faces for its proposed pathway to net zero emissions by 2050. The country perpetuates a general system of mobility that is high in pollutant emissions and road congestion, with high costs for human development,” according to the country’s annual State of the Nation report.
The passion of Claudia Dobles Camargo
But the government is making efforts to change this. An update released this week to mark one year since the launch of it’s 2050 decarbonisation plan set out the initial actions taken over the past 12 months and objectives for 2022.
Costa Rica’s first lady, Claudia Dobles Camargo, presented the progress on transport to an audience of at on Monday. An architect and urban planner ranked No.15 on the Fortune 2019 list of “World’s Greatest Leaders,” Dobles has spearheaded efforts to tackle the challenges faced in decarbonising the country’s troublesome transport system.
The country now has a network of 100 EV charge points throughout the country, Dobles explained, the first nation in Central America and the Caribbean to hit this milestone. Progress on several electric train projects is on track, she said, including for her pet project, an electric passenger train that would connect satellite towns to the east and west of San José to the centre of the capital.
Dobles has a talent for presenting a crystal clear vision of all the ways things could be better in a cleaner Costa Rica of the future. She is pushing hard to transmit to Costa Ricans her conviction that a modern, low carbon public transport system will also vastly improve their quality of life and development opportunities.
“I think that there is a whole generation there that is ready for a decarbonised economy,” she concluded on Monday, describing how her six year old son already thinks of composting and recycling as normal. “There is a whole generation there ready for a change.”
No mention was made at the event on the potential oil referendum, but plenty was on offer for the government’s alternative view of the future. It remains to be seen how it will deal with the inevitable hurdles that it, like all countries, will face on the long pathway to decarbonisation.
Must reads from the region
A new left in Latin America will have to reject extractivism, Alexander Zaitchik, The Intercept Global concern about the future of the Amazon is understandably focused on Brazil, writes New Orleans- based journalist Alexander Zaitchik. But “its agenda of unrestrained extraction represents a difference of degree and style, rather than kind, from the one embraced by every major Amazonian country of the past two decades”, he says. The “pink-tide” governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil “promoted mining, oil, and industrial agriculture as earnestly as their neoliberal counterparts in Peru and Colombia”, he argues.
Latin America’s new leftists are choosing oil despite renewables boom, Max de Haldevang, Quartz Haldevang, a New-York-based journalist, takes a critical look at the energy policies of Argentina and Mexico’s new leftist presidents. He argues both are putting the momentum of what were growing renewables sectors in jeopardy.
Use it, don’t lose it: Q&A with Amazon eco scientist, Débora Pinto, Mongabay In an interview with Brazilian journalist Débora Pinto, researcher Marcelino Guedes from Brazil’s Amapá Federal University sets out his views on the importance of indigenous knowledge and human presence for the conservation of the Amazon. To create an effective conservation dynamic in the long term, he says, the forest needs to be used “in a rational manner”, by managing resources “to gain the income and riches needed to promote well-being and development”.
Helena Gualinga is a voice for indigenous communities in the fight against climate change, Sophie Foggin, Latin America reports Colombia-based journalist Sophie Foggin talked with Helena Gualinga, a 17-year-old climate activist who grew up partly in Ecuador’s indigenous Sarayaku community and partly in Finland. She is spearheading the recently launched ‘Polluters Out’ campaign, a 40-country-wide effort to remove the influence of the fossil fuel industry.
What else I've been watching
Inside Costa Rica's first electric bus Surrounded by men in suits, Claudia Dobles Camargo exudes enthusiasm in this video last year as she rides in the country’s first electric bus through the campus of the University of Costa Rica. “This bus is going to be circulating around the [campus]... so everyone can use it… to see how it functions, to see that it is a bus that we are basically familiar with - you pay the fee exactly like any other bus, it’s a very comfortable bus - so people become interested,” she says.