Colombian President Gustavo Petro Is on a Mission Against Fossil Fuels

Puede leer nuestro artículo en Español aquí.

Last year, Colombian President Gustavo Petro watched in dismay as a political and economic crisis unfolded on the other side of his country’s eastern border. Global powers had imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s oil exports after the country’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, allegedly rigged his re-election. As hyperinflation fueled turmoil, millions of refugees poured into Colombia to escape.

In the heat of the moment, Petro decided to talk to Maduro about an idea: the leftist strongman should propose a climate pact with the country’s opposition leaders to wean Venezuela off oil. That could boost the economy by ending its dependence on oil exports, Petro said, and it could help mend the country’s broken politics. Most of all, it would save the world from the climate change that would result from Venezuela fully exploiting its oil.

The response: crickets. “I have mentioned it to Maduro, I have mentioned it to the opposition when I can talk to them,” a chagrined Petro told me in August. “But I think I am speaking another language when I talk to them.”

When it comes to climate change, Petro dreams big, even if it scares many in Colombia and threatens the country’s short-term economic interests. The former guerrilla turned climate crusader took office as President in 2022 promising to phase out fossil fuels, no small project for a nation where more than 50% of exports come from oil and coal. In office, he has stopped approval of new drilling and constrained the state-owned oil company even when deals promised big returns. Abroad, he has pushed other leaders to create their own phaseout plans. “I want to take the step to end coal- and gas-based energy,” he told me.

In the course of two interviews, one at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai and another at the Casa de Nariño presidential palace in Bogotá, Petro described climate change as central to his agenda. “I consider it as a prism. Every public policy can be viewed through that prism,” he says. “You can measure public policy by whether it exacerbates or mitigates the crisis, and make decisions based on that.”

But quitting fossil fuels in a country whose economy relies on them is … complicated. Petro’s agenda, and the uncertainty that it has created, has contributed to skepticism from investors globally. That has made financing projects to supplant fossil fuels harder and contributed to the view that Petro’s idealism is hurting the country. In polls, more than 60% of Colombians say they don’t approve of his tenure. “What’s going on in Colombia is beyond ideology,” says Iván Duque Márquez, a former President of Colombia who has become a leading global voice on climate and nature conservation. “Our people are afraid that he’s going to wreck the energy market.”

His supporters say Petro is stating the realities of climate science plainly as they are. Indeed, the world needs to end its addiction to fossil fuels—and fast. Petro’s efforts reflect that urgency, they believe. But with two years remaining in his term, the Colombian President’s radical approach faces a difficult reality: to enact his agenda, he needs to work with the market. And that will require more than bold vision.

The journey from the first police checkpoint outside the Casa de Nariño to Petro’s office is formalities followed by formality: multiple security stops and ID scans, then hold in an ornate room with servers bringing fine Colombian coffee. Inside Petro’s office, the atmosphere is strikingly different. Papers haphazardly cover the tables. A graphic novel sits below some official-looking documents. Another pile of books includes one offering an economic assessment of “crime as a profession.” A side table is stacked with yet more papers and a bag of coffee beans.

The President enters the room, dressed casually in jeans and a blazer. Bespectacled and slightly disheveled, he has less the air of a politician and more that of a wizened college professor. Widely known, and derided, for being a prolific tweeter, he remains engrossed in his phone for several paces, before looking up to greet me.

Suffice it to say, Petro is not a typical head of government. Where his predecessors made their names aligning with Colombian elites, Petro acted as a renegade and started his own political party. And where others speak in pithy talking points, he tends to long, winding answers filled with academic vocabulary. More than anything, Petro stands out because he rose to prominence as a guerrilla.

In his 2021 autobiography, One Life, Many Lives, he paints his transformation from bookish university student to rebel as one of patriotic duty. In 1970, after more than a decade of a power-sharing agreement that saw the country’s two long-standing parties essentially rotate the presidency without any real opposition, allegations of fraud generated widespread civil unrest. Petro was keen to join in as the militant group M19, which was formed in response to the contested election, rose in influence in the years that followed. His inspiration came not from reading Marx, he wrote, but of a “popular struggle born from the cultural values and history of Colombia.”

For roughly a decade, he worked for M19, serving as a representative in his hometown and distributing propaganda. The group, which claimed true electoral democracy as its greatest goal, was less violent than other militant groups, and Petro has said that his role didn’t involve participation in some of the group’s more extreme undertakings. Critics doubt it, but in any event, he was in prison at the time of the group’s most infamous act: an invasion of the Palace of Justice. After the event, he advocated for the peace talks that would eventually lead to M19 becoming a political party.

His climate transformation began in 1994 in Belgium, where he moved to serve as a diplomatic attaché, continue his studies, and escape death threats that dogged him in Colombia. At the University of Louvain, he studied development and the environment, and became absorbed in the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, which linked physics, natural resources, and economics. Today, Georgescu-Roegen is known among climate economists, but his work isn’t at the center of policy discussions. Long after entering the political arena and serving as a Senator and the mayor of Bogotá, however, Petro says he still refers to his copy of Georgescu-Roegen’s most influential work for guidance.

Petro’s academic orientation is reflected in his governance style too, with a firm adherence to principles over practicality. When it comes to climate change, he says, “I have studied it more and more, trying to read everything I can, gathering literature on it.”

Petro has crafted his own philosophy of climate and economics, one that places him outside the political tradition in which he is often associated. Historically, Latin American leftists from Brazil to Mexico have relied on oil as a source of revenue to fund their social-development priorities. He sees himself as pioneering what he calls decarbonized progressivism. “The invitation to the classic Latin American left is to broaden its horizon,” he says.

The approach, in his telling, isn’t necessarily anti-capitalist. He wants private-sector money to contribute to a transition away from oil and gas. But he also wants to tell that capital where to go. Just before I arrived in Bogotá, he unveiled a proposal for “forced investment” to require Colombian banks to finance his projects. A few weeks later, he backtracked and brokered a compromise with the banks.

Petro says that he is writing a book that will explore whether capitalism can address the climate crisis, but that he hasn’t been able to complete it because his other duties leading the country keep getting in the way. He says he’s not sure the reconciliation is possible. “If capitalism cannot, because it lacks planning capacity,” he says, then “humanity will overcome capitalism on a global scale because the alternative is that humanity will die with capitalism.”

All this theory is having a real-world impact on Colombians, especially in his approach to the country’s oil sector. Petro entered office and immediately raised taxes on oil and coal companies. He stopped new permits for oil exploration and drilling. He replaced the longtime CEO of the state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol, with his campaign manager, a political operator with experience in the country’s power sector. When I was in town, Ecopetrol nixed a $3.6 billion deal with U.S. oil major Occidental Petroleum.

These moves carry a significant political cost for Petro, agitating those focused on short-term economic outcomes and discouraging foreign investment everywhere in Colombia. “He has made it very clear to the world that he is antioil, antigas, anti-fracking and anti–United States,” Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub told investors after Petro blew up the deal. 

Petro acknowledges that others call his approach political “suicide.” But drilling more would represent a societal suicide, he says. “If Colombia’s coal reserves were used, and if Venezuela’s oil reserves were used, you couldn’t interview me again,” he says. “The world would burn. Just in the Colombian-Venezuelan subsoil, there is a weapon of mass destruction.”

Petro isn’t oblivious to the realities of oil markets, and in his telling, he is getting ahead of the problem. Colombian oil is a less desirable heavy crude and far more expensive to produce than oil from the Middle East. It’s a common view: as demand fades, as some analysts say will happen soon, expensive oil from places like Colombia will get squeezed out early. Remaking the economy now avoids economic pain later, he reasons.

Petro’s alternative economic vision is to lean into Colombia’s natural wealth, excluding fossil fuels. He aims to attract payments to protect rainforests that make up more than a third of the country and expand the rapidly growing tourism sector. Most boldly, he wants to invest in the country’s renewable energy resources, collecting wind, solar, and hydroelectric power and shipping it across the Western Hemisphere via a pan-American electric grid. “Instead of exporting fossil energy, we would export clean energy,” he says.

In October, members of his cabinet traveled to the coastal city of Barranquilla and laid out a $40 billion portfolio of projects designed to achieve Petro’s vision. The Mines and Energy Ministry described plans for a new energy company that will build renewables on the northern coast. The Commerce, Industry, and Tourism Ministry presented a lending program for small tourism businesses. The Environment Ministry proposed new programs to fund biodiversity protection. “We expect, now after all of this, that this may work to help push the economic goals,” María Susana Muhamad, the country’s Environment Minister, told me ahead of the announcement.

Colombia has already succeeded in finding some money to protect nature, but in the long term replacing dependence on oil will require private finance at a much bigger scale. That leaves Petro, and his country, in a bind. He has a big vision for a prosperous, decarbonized Colombia. But so long as he’s in charge, foreign and domestic investors may remain less enthusiastic. 

It doesn’t help that Petro is out of step with Colombia’s political establishment. The country has not had a left-wing President in its modern history. That has left Petro without control over the institutional levers available to many other leaders. Moreover, the combination of big talk and strained delivery only fuels Petro’s most ardent critics, including those who support climate action. Recent Presidents have promoted conservation and an energy transition. But Petro’s history as a guerrilla, a series of corruption scandals plaguing his government, and his unconventional economic leadership are endangering the country’s reputation, they say. “How can you invest in an economy where your profits depend on the mood of the President?” says former conservative President Duque. “It’s absolutely reckless.”

Even would-be allies have criticized Petro. In February, Jorge Iván González resigned as the head of Colombia’s National Planning Department at Petro’s request. In short order, he penned a column praising Petro’s vision but criticizing his unwillingness to accept the practical limitations to enacting it. “Instead of accepting the facts,” González wrote in La República, a Colombian business paper, “the ruler falls into the temptation of denying them.”

Petro is forging ahead regardless. Workers were still putting the finishing touches on the parklike grounds surrounding the 85-ft. Monumento a Cristo Rey when I arrived on an early August morning after a short plane ride from Bogotá. The site in the center of the Colombian city of Cali offers a glimpse of what Petro’s vision could look like. Tourists are drawn to the eye-catching hilltop statue. Nearby land is protected, some under programs where foreign companies pay locals to preserve the land. “If we have more eco-tourism in the park, that helps us protect it,” says Cali Mayor Alejandro Eder.

The city hosted a major global conference in November that aims at implementing a deal to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. Countries are debating mechanisms to share genetic material and formalizing financial programs. Hosting the conference gives Petro’s government a hand in shepherding the agenda of international nature conservation while also creating an opportunity to drum up international support for his domestic agenda.

Last year, Colombia partnered with Germany, Kenya, and France to explore programs that might forgive sovereign debt in exchange for nature protection and climate action, drawing the attention of multilateral development banks. He has championed the role that Indigenous people and African descendants can play addressing climate change. And he became a key advocate on the global stage pushing for an international treaty to cut fossil-fuel emissions.

But despite some successes, he still thinks that most of his fellow heads of government have failed to recognize the scale of the problem and are offering inadequate solutions. “The Presidents come to make some prefabricated speeches that they themselves do not write, generally, that introduce what I would call a ‘correct’ policy,” he told me in Dubai. “That ‘correct’ policy is false.”

Instead of offering piecemeal solutions, Petro says he is focused on a vision to avoid what he terms “collective suicide.” There is a way in which this approach is admirable. To honestly face the conclusions of climate science is to recognize that humanity is on the brink of irreversible and catastrophic change. It’s the role of leaders to chart a way forward, no matter the tough politics.

But what good does it do if others don’t follow? In that regard, Petro is his own toughest critic. He knows people hear him, but to what end? “We draw attention in the world for this. They listen to us,” he says. “They don’t pay heed, but they listen.”

TIME receives support for climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. TIME is solely responsible for all content