by Sonia Shah
With the Colombian government effectively occupied with the fight against the guerrillas, Colombian drug traffickers soon expanded into even more lucrative narcotics to feed the growing ranks of U.S. drug users: cocaine and heroin.54
If U.S. policies and the desires of its consumers sparked Colombia’s drug trade and guerrilla insurrection, it was oil that would help keep the conflagration fueled for years.
In 1983, Occidental Petroleum discovered a true El Dorado: 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Caño Limón oilfield near the Venezuelan border. In the black gold rush that followed, a 483-mile pipeline across the Andes mountains was built in less than three years55 as the populations around the oilfields tripled.56 This was the “ hottest . . . action to hit Latin America in years,” Oil & Gas Journal reported. The oil finds would “revolutionize Colombia’s economy,” the magazine wrote.57 By 1986, Colombia had flipped from being a net importer of crude to a net exporter, sending more oil to the United States than Norway’s North Sea fields.58 Two years later, oil companies drilled no fewer than eighty exploratory wells, searching for more oil. In 1988, BP found the Cusiana oilfield, to date the last giant oilfield discovered in Colombia, holding 1.5 billion barrels of oil.
By then, the fire of Colombia’s civil strife had overwhelmed much of the country; homicide had become the leading cause of death for adult men in Colombia, and the second leading cause of deaths overall.59
For the military, guerrillas, and paramilitary groups locked in hostilities, oil provided an ideally vulnerable asset to harness in service of their cause. Paramilitary groups funded themselves by selling gasoline stolen from illegal taps on the pipelines. By the late 1990s, using extortions and kidnapping, guerrillas raked in $140 million a year from the oil patch, a sum rivaling the amount they were pulling in from their alliances with drug traffickers.60 The ELN bombed the Caño Limón pipeline no fewer than five hundred times between 1984 and 2003. One such explosion aimed at the pipeline sent a fifty-meter fireball hurtling toward a village, slaughtering seventy people as they slept in their beds.
The government, in response, intensified its war against the rebels, “militarizing these [oil-rich] areas and terrorizing the local population, whom they presume to be guerrilla supporters,” as advocates from the North American Congress on Latin America reported.61
Oil companies help foot the bill, paying a “war tax” of $1 per barrel to help the government pay the military and police to guard the oilfields. Occidental has also allegedly paid guerrillas directly. According to an embassy official who spoke to activists from Witness for Peace, “Occidental gave [the guerrillas] between $1 and $5 million so that they would not blow up the pipeline during construction.”62
As analysts at the Washington Office on Latin America conclude, Colombian crude “provides revenues that enhance the armed actors’ ability to participate in the war; the war in turn, provides them with opportunities for profit.”63 It’s a positive war economy that shows no signs of abating as long as the crude keeps flowing.
Sometimes, oil companies conspired directly with the Colombian military to subdue guerrillas, catching innocent civilians in the cross-fire. Occidental, for instance, had hired contractors to fly over the company’s pipelines, looking out for guerrillas. In December 1998, they did much more than that.
This time, they took a Colombian air force officer with them. They weren’t just looking for guerrillas; they were helping the air force pinpoint where to drop a United States-made cluster bomb on them. When they flubbed the job, fingering a village instead of a rebel stronghold, the Colombian pilots dropped a bomb on the village of Santo Domingo, killing eighteen unarmed villagers.
One man lost three relatives that day, as the Los Angeles Times reported:His mother, who had been tending the family store at the front of their home, was killed by flying shrapnel. His fourteen-year-old cousin was killed after running outside and waving in an effort to alert the airmen that there were civilians below. His twenty-five-year-old sister died en route to a hospital. His blind father survived wounds to both shoulders.
In 2000, Occidental’s president testified before Congress in favor of a multibillion military aid package to Colombia; Texaco, Occidental, and BP all lobbied for the aid package, although it ostensibly was meant for the fight against drug trafficking, not guerrillas in the oil patch. By the end of the year, 85,000 gallons of pesticide had been sprayed on Colombian coca fields, sickening locals and livestock for miles around. The amount of coca under cultivation rose, nevertheless, by almost 25 percent.64
The drug war foundering, the Bush administration made its aims more explicit in 2003. Bush earmarked over $100 million for U.S. forces to train Colombians on how to better protect the oil industry’s pipelines. In his 2004 budget proposal, the Bush administration requested another $147 million to station eight hundred soldiers along the precious pipe.
One villager who lost his father and cousin in the Santo Domingo massacre couldn’t understand it. “I would ask the United States, ‘Why do you want to train more people to kill peasants?’”65
The answer was simple, according to the U.S. ambassador in Colombia. Big Oil’s pipelines and the golden liquid they carried were “important to the future of . . . petroleum supplies and the confidence of our investors.”66
The International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) and human rights lawyers filed a suit against Occidental for their role in the Santo Domingo massacre in 2003. But it was unclear whether the U.S. government would allow it to move forward. When the ILRF had helped villagers from the Indonesian province of Aceh sue ExxonMobil for hiring Indonesian soldiers to brutally violate them, the State Department squelched the case, warning the court that the case couldn’t be heard because it would “risk a potentially serious adverse impact on significant interests of the United States.”
By 2004, BP and Occidental together were pumping out 70 percent of Colombia’s daily oil flow. Despite the terror, the kidnappings, and extortions, according to a BP spokesperson, Colombia’s oil still provides “a good return” and “is a solid, robust investment.” Plus, he added, “there are still sites to be found.”67
Conservatively projecting from World Bank figures, activists at Catholic Relief Services calculated that between 2003 and 2013, over $200 billion in oil revenues will be deposited into the slim bank accounts of sub-Saharan African countries, where oil companies have targeted new oil. The World Bank planned to foot some of the bill of building the new oil infrastructure that would help siphon West African oil, despite its own analysts telling it that bankrolling oil projects in poor countries “did more harm than good,” as the New York Times reported.68 In Equatorial Guinea, for example, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Total, and others rushed to buy up oil licenses, the Texan oilmen descending upon the nation’s capital, Malabo, aboard flights conveniently routed direct from Houston. “The hopes of people watching new pipelines built through their communities or seeing the impressive installation of offshore platforms can be palpably felt,” writes Karl. “They believe that oil will bring jobs, food, schools, healthcare, agricultural support, and housing.” Yet revelations in the news media suggested that the pernicious cycle had already begun: in 2003 Equatorial Guinea’s president had deposited over $300 million in oil income in a private bank account in Washington, DC.69 A 2004 U.S. congressional inquiry revealed that oil companies had been paying the president and his relatives millions of dollars, depositing the funds directly into their personal bank accounts.70
Tiny São Tomé, which the U.S. State Department deemed “the only stable democracy in West Africa” descended into oil-boom-induced chaos by July 2003, as military leaders unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the democratically elected president, explaining that “at the bottom of [the coup attempt] was oil.”71 In January 2006, an experimental agreement between the World Bank and Chad to devote oil income to poverty reduction failed, when Chad’s parliament voted to overturn the agreement and spend its oil money on the military or howeve
r else the Chadian leadership deemed fit, without oversight.72
After West African oil starts to dry up, the next black gold rush will most likely occur in some other impoverished region. Having scoured and depleted much of the West’s oil endowment, the U.S. oil industry, between 2002 and 2022, planned to spend the biggest portion of its exploration budget searching for oil in developing countries.73
Oil execs are, by and large, unrepentant about the fallout their activities will have on local people living under despotic regimes empowered by petrodollars. As Forbes magazine noted, “if you are running a big oil company, you either deal with the despots or watch your company liquidate itself.”74
“You kinda have to go where the oil is,” added ExxonMobil’s Lee Raymond.75
CHAPTER EIGHT
Carbon Perils
FOR HUNDREDS OF millions of years, the carbon that had filtered down deep into the earth’s crust lay dormant, locked in its silent caves and tunnels beneath tons of rock. Then, in just a blink of time, humans expelled over half of it back to the circulating winds and currents at the surface of the planet.
The first glimmers of what this might do to the climate had been predicted over a century ago. In 1883, in an explosion heard over two thousand miles away, the Indonesian volcano Krakatau erupted, projecting ash, dust, and carbon dioxide six miles out into the atmosphere. Over 35,000 people died under tidal waves and a two-hundred-foot-thick layer of ash smothered area islands. The sun’s rays didn’t penetrate the thick cloud of dust for over two days.
On the other side of the planet, the chemist Svante Arrhenius was studying for his doctorate. The eruption set him to thinking. He theorized that the rapidly growing factories spouting carbon and other pollutants into the air might not be so different from Krakatau’s explosive release in its climate-changing impacts. He called it the “hothouse” effect.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, along with methane and water vapor, absorbs the heat that radiates from the sun-warmed ground and seas, enmeshing the planet in a warming protective blanket. Water vapor is more abundant and methane absorbs more heat, but carbon dioxide is arguably a more dynamic player. It can linger in the atmosphere for centuries.1 A doubling of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide levels, Arrhenius wrote in an 1896 paper, would increase the planet’s average temperature by five to six degrees Celsius.
The wooly Swede wasn’t too worried about it. The global warming would “allow our descendants, even if they only be those of a distant future, to live under a warmer sky and in a less harsh environment than we were granted.”2
During the 1980s, humans released 5.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year, primarily from the global combustion of oil, natural gas, and coal.3 Every single car buzzing around hauled a 5-pound sack of carbon out its tailpipe every 20 miles or so. Once dug up from its underground tomb and sapped of the energy that bonds them hydrogens, the on-the-loose carbons link up with heavier oxygen atoms and make their escape into the air. The 5-pound bag of carbon balloons into a 19-pound bubble of carbon dioxide gas. Every barrel of oil burned sends up 800-odd pounds more.4
The forests suck in about 1.4 billion tons of the excess carbon. The oceans slowly take up another 1.7 billion tons. But at least 3 billion tons of extra carbon are not absorbed by the increasingly denuded land or the oceans. They linger in the atmosphere, catching the sun’s reradiated heat as the centuries tick on.5
By the early 1980s, Arrhenius’ hothouse effect was discernable. There hadn’t been so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for perhaps as long as 20 million years.6
Peruvian fishermen had named the warm ocean current that visited their shores after baby Jesus, the boy child or el niño in Spanish, because it always seemed to appear around Christmas. Usually, the fish stocks died down for a bit while El Niño lingered, but it didn’t matter much as the hardworking fishers wanted a break for the holidays anyway.7 The warm patch would generally pay annual visits to the shorelines of Peru and Ecuador for about three to six years in a row. After that, cool currents rushed in, an opposite phenomenon later named La Niña. The natural fluctuation between El Niño and La Niña had probably been going on for millennia, influencing the trade winds, jet stream, and storm tracks that shaped the planet’s climate.8
In the winter of 1982 to 1983, El Niño torched the seas by four degrees Celsius. About two thousand people died in the droughts, floods, fires, and storms that followed, resulting in over $13 billion in damages.9 Afterward, El Niño storms became more frequent and intense, and a host of other disturbing changes were noted.
In 1987, marine biologists, oceanographers, and other experts gathered in the Virgin Islands to discuss a mysterious new scourge that had befallen the Caribbean’s coral reefs. Across the region that year, the usually colorful coral reefs had started to turn white.
For their lush colors, coral polyps, small anemone-like creatures, rely on tiny plant-like creatures called zooxanthellae that live in their tissues. The photosynthesizing zooxanthellae provide the polyp with both food and energy. Their humble partnership allows both to thrive in clear, calm tropical waters where most other creatures would be hard pressed to find a meal. This relationship also allows the polyp to grow in great colonies, building their limestone skeletons one atop the other, arduously creating the world’s coral reefs. Giant reefs provide oases in clear, underwater nutrient deserts, attracting teams of diverse species of fish and marine mammals. Their massive skeletal walls protect coastlines from erosion and provide calm waters that many fish species use as nurseries for their young.
But the coral polyps had expelled their zooxanthellae, without whom they turned white or bleached. Pockets of “uncommonly hot water” noted one coral expert, may have been to blame. If the strange warmth persisted and the polyps and zooxanthellae didn’t partner up again, within a few weeks the polyps would die of starvation.
Luckily, most of the Caribbean’s corals survived 1987’s summer heat. But, the coral experts agreed, when the rainforests of the sea collectively blanch, it could be a “signal of change, a signal worth looking into,” as one told the New York Times.10
Over the past hundred years, the Pacific ocean warmed by almost four-fifths of a degree Celsius;11 and the land by about half a degree Celsius. The Arctic sea ice thinned by 40 percent. The warmer temperatures and drip of melting ice off the continents have expanded the volume of the sea, the newly enlarged waters overflowing into freshwater reservoirs, drowning miles of coastline. The global sea level rose between ten and twenty centimeters during the past century.12
These changes could be less than half of the effects expected from the carbon dioxide emissions of the last two centuries, as they likely are the consequences of emissions from long ago.13 Worse, changes in the climate could trigger other changes, which might intensify the initial effects. The pressure would build and slowly a giant switch could be flicked. Things might change rapidly after that.
For instance, warmer seas (or a drop in sea level) could melt methane hydrates, triggering massive meltdowns that could rapidly release billions of tons of methane into the air.14 Because the methane in the hydrates is so concentrated—a single crystal holds 160 times more methane than a similar volume of pure methane gas—even relatively small meltdowns could release tons of heat-trapping methane into the atmosphere. Fifteen thousand years ago, meltdowns shot the global temperature up by ten degrees Celsius, an abrupt finale to the last ice age.15
Wide bands of carbon-sucking forests, fine-tuned to thrive within a precise range of climatic conditions, could rapidly collapse. Although some animals might flee on foot and wing northward to escape the encroaching hot, dry weather, many species of trees can’t spread more than a few hundred feet in a year. If current rates of warming continue, they will have to move about two miles a year to stay within their climate comfort-zones. Whole forests might be left rooted to inhospitable spots, depleting the planet’s capacity to absorb extra carbon in the air.16 As the carbon locked in their de
composing carcasses is released into the air, the planet’s forests could switch from being a net carbon absorber to a net contributor.
According to computer models, even if humans stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the sea may keep rising and the ice sheets continue melting for hundreds, even thousands of years. By 2100, the sea level could rise by as much as eighty-eight centimeters over its 1990 levels. The temperature of the planet could rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius, a dire prediction given that a shift of just a few degrees spells the difference between a green, habitable planet and one enveloped in snow and ice.17
Human civilizations had arisen during an unusually stable period in the planet’s climate, which the earth had enjoyed since the end of the last ice age ten thousand years ago. Before, brutally rapid changes in the climate, probably triggered by the switching on and off of ocean currents, had most likely been a merciless constant in Earth’s long history. That period of climatic stability, it appeared, was coming to a close.18
The news about human-induced climate change trickled down into the heart of the oil industry, where, at London’s premier training ground for oil and mining companies, the Royal School of Mines, gangly, curly-haired oceanographer Jeremy Leggett recounted the legends of oil strikes to his enrapt students. Surrounded by superstars of the oil world, Leggett helped train hundreds of petroleum engineers and geologists. One of Leggett’s colleagues had found an oilfield in Pakistan. “When the well had hit oil, he threw an impromptu champagne party for half the faculty in a luxury Kensington hotel. Lectures were cancelled for days afterwards,” Leggett recalled.
Leggett had fallen in love with the search for crude. Money was part of the appeal. Leggett’s lucrative academic career at the Royal School of Mines sent him jet-setting across the globe, enjoying the finest sashimi in Japan and the best Bordeaux in France, attempting to pinpoint where the seas of long ago had left their rich oily sediments.
