After arriving in San Jose on Wednesday in a hydrogen-fueled bus, the new Costa Rican President, a former journalist named Carlos Alvarado, announced plans during his inaugural address to ban fossil fuels and become the first fully decarbonised country in the world, according to a report in The Independent.
“Decarbonisation is the great task of our generation and Costa Rica must be one of the first countries in the world to accomplish it, if not the first,” said Mr Alvarado. “We have the titanic and beautiful task of abolishing the use of fossil fuels in our economy to make way for the use of clean and renewable energies.”
The implementation of this renewable energy push will come in tandem with Costa Rica’s 200th anniversary of independence, which will be celebrated in 2021—the year that the president plans to fully end the use of fossil fuel in transport, saying, “When we reach 200 years of independent life we will take Costa Rica forward and celebrate…that we’ve removed gasoline and diesel from our transportation.”
While this promise may seem like a pipedream to many, Costa Rica is known for their environmental dedication and already generates over 99% of their energy through renewables. This push will not come without significant challenges, considering the short timeline they’ve given themselves. “A proposal like this one must be seen by its rhetoric value and not by its technical precision,” Mr Lara said, claiming that achieving this goal as soon as 2021 is probably unrealistic but it will lay the groundwork for faster action towards that goal.
Oscar Echeverría, president of the Vehicle and Machinery Importers Association, approaches this plan with caution, saying, “If there’s no previous infrastructure, competence, affordable prices and waste management we’d be leading this process to failure. We need to be careful.”
But economist Monica Araya, a Costa Rican sustainability expert and director of Costa Rica Limpia, is more optimistic about this plans possibilities to send a powerful message to the world about the future of fossil fuels in the transportation industry, which has been one of the toughest industries to make renewable and is the country’s main source of non-renewable emissions. “Getting rid of fossil fuels is a big idea coming from a small country. This is an idea that’s starting to gain international support with the rise of new technologies,” she said.
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