Hoping to boost investment in its oil industry, Colombia has removed certain environmental restrictions on seismic surveys and test drilling. The action, contained in a presidential decree issued May 4, eliminates measures requiring oil companies to obtain environmental licenses for seismic work and for each test well they drill. Now companies may drill any number of test wells in exploratory blocks for which they have a license, and carry out seismic testing without having to apply for a license. The steps are intended to stimulate investment by making it less time consuming—and thus, less costly—for oil companies to seek out new reserves. Oil production in Colombia has hovered around 850,000 barrels a day and could slip to 200,000 barrels a day in a...
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Concerned by evidence of high lead levels in children, Mexico’s attorney general for environmental protection has ordered the world’s biggest silver smelter and fourth-largest lead producer to cut its smokestack emissions by 52%. The May 21 order targets the Met-Mex Peñoles plant in the northern desert city of Torreón, Coahuila. In recent weeks state health officials have found lead levels above 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood in 2,535 of 2,850 children tested in a neighborhood near the facility. Mexico has no regulation limiting lead emissions, nor has it established what levels of lead are permissible in the bloodstream. But in 1991, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta designated 10 micrograms per deciliter as the blood-lead level of...
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Little more than three months after taking office, Atala Uriana Pocaterra, President Hugo Chávez’ Environment and Renewable Natural Resources Minister and the nation’s first indigenous Cabinet member, resigned her post on May 19. Uriana says she had decided to run as a candidate for an upcoming national constituent assembly, part of the new president’s plan to reform the government of Venezuela. She joins numerous other government officials who have resigned to help strengthen Chávez’s hand in the assembly. Vice Minister Guillermo Branch and Jesús Pérez, the environment ministry’s director of land-use planning, are considered among Uriana’s possible successors...
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NGOs concerned about how free trade might affect environmental regulation in the hemisphere are putting their case to negotiators of the proposed 34-nation Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In a session organized last month in Miami by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), NGO representatives gave a briefing and issued position papers to 21 negotiators developing investment rules for the free-trade area. The negotiators, in Miami for an early round of FTAA talks, are relying partly on language in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That worries NGOs including CIEL, Public Citizen, the Preamble Center for Public Policy, and Friends of the Earth. In particular, they’re concerned a clause similar to NAFTA’s Chapter 11 will become part of the...
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In Colombia, thousands of barrels of crude oil spilled into a river whose waters flow into western Venezuela, the environmentally destructive result of another oil pipeline bombing by Colombian guerrillas. The spill occurred May 16 when an explosion tore through a portion of a 480-mile (770-km) pipeline that runs from Colombia’s Caño Limón oil fields to the port at Coveñas, on the Caribbean coast. Two days later, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company announced 6,000 barrels of oil had been skimmed from the Tarra River, which flows from Colombia into Venezuela. Authorities said the spill fouled a 9-mile (15 km) stretch of the Catatumbo River but had been kept out of Lake Maracaibo. The bombing is believed to have been the work of...
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Mexican transportation officials this month signed a memorandum of understanding with a California company as part of a project to convert 70,000 taxis, mini buses and microbuses in outlying Mexico City so they can run on compressed natural gas or propane. Under the accord, signed by IMPCO Technologies of Cerritos, California and the State of Mexico’s Communications and Transport Secretariat, IMPCO’s Mexican subsidiary will supervise the conversion program. On May 10, one week after signing the agreement, Grupo IMPCO Mexicano began working with the transport secretariat to plan the first of 3,000 conversions, which the company exects to be complete within six months. Propane-powered vehicles emit 85% less exhaust pollution than gasoline driven cars, and propane is 50% cheaper than unleaded gas in Mexico...
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