“Mr. President, Cesar is waiting for you.”, This was the title of the Center for Socioeconomic and Regional Studies (Cesore) the manifesto addressed to the Government of Gustavo Petro to request a visit “long and stretched”in which the president explains the plan to replace the coal economy on which the department still depends.
Read also: President Petro attacked coal again: “The solution is to stop extracting it”
According to Cesore’s investigations, the return of the mining titles held by the Prodeco company, in the Jagua de Ibirico, has left nearly 5,000 direct and indirect jobs unemployed.
“Additionally, there were 15 million tons per year that were produced for export, which generated about US$4.5 billion for the country, some 19 billion pesos, a complete tax reform.”explains the organization, which questions the national government’s decision not to award titles to other companies.
COAL AND GLOBAL WARMING
The argument is the well-known environmental position of the Government, however, Professor Jorge Molina Escobar, in an interview with La Silla Vacía in June of this year, said: “Within the total global greenhouse gas emissions, Colombia does not contribute even 0.5 percent of those emissions. In Colombia, of the 291 million tons of carbon dioxide we produce, the coal industry emits 4.1 million tons.. This means that coal production barely contributes 1.4 percent of the country’s total emissions.”.
This dilemma, as Cesore calls it, leaves as “losers to a fringe of workers” and given the high rates of poverty in the department and lack of hospitals, roads and schools, it would also be “a social bomb that is about to explode”.
WHAT IS PLAN B?
Article 186 of the National Development Plan established that those mining titles classified as large-scale mining for the extraction of thermal coal in the open pit that are finished or that end for any reason “must carry out the necessary steps to achieve the definitive closure of the operations in accordance with current and applicable regulations”.
Do not stop reading: Petro insists on the decarbonization of the economy: What would Cesar and La Guajira be like?
So things, Cesore indicated that “If the Government continues in its position of not awarding mining titles, then let it say how it is going to replace those jobs and that income that the department, its municipalities and especially the unemployed workers are failing to receive ”.
The document also reads that the Cesarenses are willing to listen to the proposal that the national government brings to the region.
“Hopefully there will be a plan B immediately to start replacing coalbut we believe that to date this does not exist, with reason that President Petro has not come to Cesar”, pointed out the Study Center.
By General Editor.
