Bringing Home the Baku

Biochar is the new Black Gold.

In Baku Azerbaijan at COP29, Colombia’s minister of environment, Susana Muhamad, told Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow!:

We are the fifth-largest exporter of coal in the world, and our economy depends on the export of fossil fuels. So, for us, the transition is not only an energy transition, it’s a whole economy transition. How are we going to replace the fiscal incomes that are happening from the export of fossil fuels, and also, what are the other sectors of the economy that will be replacing them? So, for us, it’s an environmental stand, but it’s also a very pragmatic stand, because what we foresee in the future 15 years from now is that our markets will be closing, and we need an alternative.

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We are making — tripling renewables, but at the same time, we’re expanding fossil fuels. So we are not dealing, we are not tackling, really, the climate problem, and we are creating more energy capacity. We are not using renewables to replace fossil fuels. And this is a big problem. And the reason is we haven’t created the economic conditions for that economic transition.

She really gets at the nut of it, doesn’t she? I was having a Zoom call with a colleague in Denmark and we started chatting about the new Taylor Sheridan streaming series with Billy Bob…