With oil prices soaring, Colombia helps feed coal craze

With gas prices soaring and millions of people in Latin American and other parts of the world being plunged back into poverty, it's not surprising that there's a global scramble to find new energy sources.

Many energy-hungry countries are buying up coal to fuel their power plants, as the Times' Chris Kraul writes from Colombia. Never mind that this Industrial Age fossil fuel is one of the dirtiest pollutants known to man and a leading source of the carbon and methane emissions that help produce the greenhouse gases that most scientists agree contribute to global warming.

Or, as Henry Henderson, the Chicago-based Midwest director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, puts it in Kraul's story, "Growing coal use threatens nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it."

Colombia, better known for such as exports as coffee beans, is one of the leading countries (along with Indonesia, Australia and Russia) trying to cash in on the growing demand for coal.

Kraul profiles the El Cerrejon coal mine in rural Albania, Colombia. "El Cerrejon has generally been credited with being environmentally kind, as coal mines go," he writes.

"The owners say they are making an effort to reclaim the areas already stripped by planting trees and pasture, predicting that they will be habitable decades from now when the coal is gone."

"But other areas of Colombia, particularly the historic port city of Santa Marta and its surrounding beach areas, are suffering spills and barge sinkings, which have damaged fishing and tourism along the country's Caribbean coast."

-- Reed Johnson in Mexico City

Photo: At Colombia’s El Cerrejon mine, a fleet of electric shovels runs around the clock to extract the coal that helps meet energy demands in Chile, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Credit: El Cerrejon

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