The world's first really green oil deal

[Turborama]

Ecuador's £3.6bn scheme to save its rainforest from exploitation could point the way to sparing other threatened landscapes

By Esmé McAvoy


The Tiputini river on the border of Ecuador's Yasuni National Park, which is threatened by oil
drilling. Ecuador's UN-backed plan to leave the oil in the ground would mitigate global warming

Sunday, August 8 2010

The world's first genuinely green energy deal is about to be sealed. In a plan which could be a blueprint for saving large tracts of the planet from exploitation, a greater value is being put on a pristine wilderness than on the oil that lies beneath.

While the world's industrialised countries are building complex carbon markets to enable them to carry on polluting, Ecuador has come up with a much simpler idea for mitigating climate change: leave the oil underground. It is promising to lock up as much as a fifth of its oil reserves indefinitely, providing rich nations pay out at least half the market value of the oil – some $3.6bn – as compensation.

The trail-blazing proposal was first floated in 2007, but it took a step towards reality last week when the UN Development Programme signed an agreement with the Ecuadorean government to be the independent administrator for the project's trust fund. The accord makes Ecuador the only country in the world offering to leave lucrative oil reserves untapped in an attempt to slow climate change.

Crucially, the oil in question – some 846 billion barrels of crude – lies beneath the Yasuni National Park, one of the most bio-diverse swathes of rainforest on the planet. Located in the heart of the Ecuadorean Amazon, one hectare contains more tree species than the whole of the US and Canada combined. It is also home to 105 amphibian species – the UK has six – more than 500 birds, 200 mammals and countless insects and plants. Declared a world biosphere reserve by Unesco in 1989, the park is also the ancestral land of two of the world's last remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes, the Tagaeri and the Taromenane.

Full article: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-worlds-first-really-green-oil-deal-2046512.html

[txlibdem]

1. Don't worry, our oil companies will buy off their politicians soon enough

Once the oil companies either own or kill the politicians that oppose oil drilling it'll be full steam ahead for the rape of Ecuador's pristine areas. Another "win" for good old American Capitalism!

[Prometheus Bound]

2. "a greater value is being put on a pristine wilderness than on the oil that lies beneath."

That's beautiful!