Hmmm. Whaddya reckon?
from Mother Jones blog
Ecuador Wants Us to Pay for the Amazon
This dilemma cuts to the core of environmentalism today. Ecuador is asking for international compensation to leave alone a major oilfield in the heart of the Amazon.
Ecuador’s president says he will wait up to one year for a response before drilling. At stake are not only plant and animal species, but also the homeland of several tribes living in voluntary isolation. These tribes are among the fiercest on Earth, renowned for giant spears.
“Ecuador doesn’t ask for charity,” said President Rafael Correa, “but does ask that the international community share in the sacrifice and compensates us with at least half of what our country would receive, in recognition of the environmental benefits that would be generated by keeping this oil underground.” That could come out to about $350 million per year.
Environmental groups are in disagreement. To pay or not to pay? Arguments against:
1) Biodiversity is priceless. Destroying this part of the Amazon is evil. But paying for abstention would implicitly legitimize its exploitation.
2) Ecuador might be ethical enough to leave it alone anyway. If we pay, who else will come out of the woodwork to demand compensation what they might have left alone? There’s no money pot to pay for everything.
3) Paying for what should be a given might exacerbate the situation. A slightly-related case: When well-meaning Christian groups bought modern-day slaves in Africa in order to set them free a few years ago, they put enough cash into the system to promote more slave raids, after the market would have died on its own. Talk about a road to hell paved with good intentions.
Argument for:
1) For environmentalism to work, we need to integrate it into the economy, not just morality and law.2) With $4,500 income per capita, Ecuador is among the poorest half of nations. Oil is its biggest source of income.
3) Again, biodiversity is priceless. Ecologists and economists have estimated that the value of all natural ecosystems across the world - in terms of their services to humanity - is about 30 trillion dollars a year. That’s more than the GNP of all nations combined. But in this case Ecuador is making it easy for us by asking for just half of potential oil revenue. So the question becomes, who would pay, and how?”
April 30th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Getting paid for doing nothing? Any socialist worth her salt would go for it!
1, 2, and 3 (against) are the likely winners.
“These tribes are among the fiercest on Earth, renowned for giant spears.”
I don’t think spears are going to trouble anyone, unless they put a Britney before that….
April 30th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Fantastic!
This is really putting the issues of conservation and global warming on the map in the most concrete way.
With respect to what’s being debated in Bangkok :
IPCC conference on solutions to climate change
I suspect that what is required is to calculate the tonnage of carbon saved by keeping the oil in the ground, add in the saving from not destroying the rain forest, and multiply that by the going rate for CO2 carbon trading.
I have a sinking feeling that this would not amount to $350M per year, however. But we need to get a handle on these issues and associated trade-offs now, because we’re going to hell in a handbasket.
May 1st, 2007 at 9:40 am
Both the arguments for and against are intelligent and logical. What we need to sort out is what we are paying for. If we are simply giving in to blackmail, in a similar way to Al Quaeda’s demands over hostages then the answer is clear; we should not pay, and for the same reasons.
But if Equador is making a just demand that those of us benefiting from the protection of the rain forest should share in the costs of its preservation, and that it shoud not be left simply to the resources of a poor country, then we should pay.
The slaving analogy could be expanded. We should not pay slavers for their slaves (the same dilemma applies to paying battery farmers for their “spent” chooks in order to liberate them), but if members of an anti-slavery group gave up well-paid jobs and devoted all their time to liberating slaves, then it would be reasonable for all of us concerned with the abolition of slavery, and who were not fighting similar battles ourselves, to make a donation towards their support.
May 1st, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Hmmm. Whaddya reckon? Coal found under native snails?
http://www.savehappyvalley.org.nz/node/287
Charity starts at home
May 1st, 2007 at 12:56 pm
OnceBitten
Good point. If we leave *all* our coal in the ground, can we get heaps of cash, too?
How about we conduct more exploration for gas and oil fields (the resources from which are uneconomic to extract) and “agree to leave it there, for say….um…..400m per year” (worth a shot).
Making money has never been so easy….
May 1st, 2007 at 1:31 pm
PEL I think you missed the point Solid Energy haven’t made a cent and possibly wiped out a species in the process. Did you read the link?
We would be better investing in our environment before Ecuador’s.
Destroying the environment has never been so easy…
May 1st, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Don’t get me wrong - money for doing nothing is a fine idea.
I don’t think it’s in any way realistic. Barking mad, in fact.
No one will pay for it.
May 1st, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Well, once you recognise that we have a planetary carbon/climate problem, then you need methods for addressing it by setting market signals through taxes and subsidies.
Otherwise you just admit defeat and watch the planet cook. Dr Strangelove II : “How I learned to stop worrying and love global warming.”
But compensating the opportunity cost of foregoing resource extraction is not the easiest part to start with.
First, you need to set international tariffs on fossil fuels. I’m not sure if these should be paid by the resource extractor or the resource consumer. Perhaps the ideal would be a global tax along the lines of GST, where you only pay tax on that fraction of the energy you actually consume, and the rest is passed on and paid by the consumer of the finished goods.
Or something. A bit of a pipe dream. More practical : a tax on the resource extractor, at X dollars/euros/yuan per ton CO2 equivalent. This would obviously be passed on by the extractor to the buyer. The UN energy agency would administer this tax, and use the money to fund climate change offsetting measures : saving/planting forests, carbon sequestration initiatives etc. Not subsidising sustainable energy : the market should take care of that, once the fossil energy sources correctly internalise their costs.
May 4th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Hmmm - what about ….
Suppose someone in Christchurch turns off their heated towel rails and installs some insulation or solar heating. They are *good* - they will get interest free loans and carbon credits for the energy they save.
Suppose a school in Prey Veng, Cambodia, puts in a generator and installs lighting and some computers. They are *evil* and have to pay fuel tax and buy carbon credits from the people in Christchurch. And if it gets so hot they need air conditioning …
Also - Cambodia has discovered oil. Someone wrote to the Cambodia Daily expressing the hope that the oil revenue could enable the government to get teacher:pupil ratios down to 1:50. GDP per capita is about half that of Equador’s. The people who make your cloths get around $1000 a year - and that is considered a good job.
Should Cambodia have to pay a huge resource extraction tax to fund off-set measures to soak up the carbon produced by SUV drivers in New Zealand? Or maybe just be *moral* and leave it in the ground? Would supplying sustainable energy to people who currently use almost no energy be an off-set measure or would they have to fire up some generators first? Or should they just not be able to use energy?
Like the forests - save a forest, you get no money. Cut it down and sell the timber, and you can get funding to re-establish the forest. Is Cambodia allowed to cut down the same percentage of forest that New Zealand cut down?
I don’t know. I’d like someone to fly over and drive out to Prey Veng in a 2 ton V8 white SUV (the white ones are do gooders - the black ones are Military and Government) and to explain to the Cambodians why they cannot use their oil, or, if they do, they have to pay a huge tax to the UN (to hire a few more secretaries, perhaps?). Why they will not be able to afford to make the concrete they need for schools, but are not allowed to use wood. Cannot use charcoal, but will still not be able to afford electricity. I’d like to watch. I can’t explain it. But I’ll be a long way away watching.
Nope - I can not see it without some sort of subsidy.
Of course, the school in Prey Veng needs windows and so forth first …
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcrobertson/482436388/
May 4th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
alistair Says: Dr Strangelove II : “How I learned to stop worrying and love global warming.�
ROFL!!! Now that’s my kinda humour! Nice one Alistair
May 4th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Tell you what Don. If every country gets a carbon consumption quota per head of inhabitant, I think that changes your little prose poem quite a bit.
Americans and Kiwis etc. need to decrease their consumption or pay the tax. Cambodians can increase their consumption to make concrete, and still get a refund (which could pay for schools, designed to fit the climate and not need air conditioning), because their current consumption per head is very low indeed.
If they think ahead, they may invest in renewable electricity rather than diesel generators, thus conserving carbon quota.
May 5th, 2007 at 2:49 am
The drowning statistics from the 1860’s show that traffic was growing twice as fast as the population well before the motorcar arrived on the scene. This was probably because the new imigrants were spreading out into the countryside. The combination of the motorcar and stupid land use planning has meant that our towns and cities have been spreading out into the countryside too, so that traffis has been growing more than twice as fast as the population. This legacy of the “healthy” quarter acre section policy introduced by the Seddon goverment has got to be slammed into reverse in way the general public will accept and a variation on the Equador idea might just do it.
This idea is inspired by the situation in Christchurch but it should work for city including the 4 cities in Auckland. Establish a green belt around the city. Introduce a 10c a litre petrol tax to fund the purchase of this land by the city council. Plant the green belt in native forest. Use the carbon credits to fund investment in public transport or high density council housing within walking distance of the CBD or even to within the CBD if there are run down areas that need to be brought back to life. This type of inner city renewal has worked wonders in Stockholm, London and Manchester, although they had plenty of abandoned shipyards and docklands. The key thing is that it reverses the the long running outwards growth of cities which of course reverses the growth in average commute distances. It’s important to realise that ultimately we can’t public transport our way out of congestion any more than we can motorway our way out of gridlock so ultimately we’ve got to rebuild walking cities.
Incidently, if Auckland’s congestion only happens because employers insist that almost everybody starts and finishes work at the same times it means lack of infrastructure isn’t the problem and multi-billion dollar spend-ups on motorways, busway and railways aren’t the solution . A cheap, simple and radical solution to the actual problem would be to introduce a 36 hour working week, 10% increase in hourly pay rates of course, 10% reduction in break time to keep employers happy. The 36 hours must be divided into either 6hrs/6days or 9hrs/4days or 12hrs/3days. Multiple start and finish times will spread the load on both roads and public transport. Spreading the load on public transport over more hours of the day will make it very cost effective to run high frequency services all the time and not just during a few hours in the morning and evening. Then the regional petrol tax could be spent on green belts so the carbon credits are available when you do need more public transport infrastructure, ie bring back the trams or finally build the underground loop under the CBD.
The rural roading problems are quite different, because they have become lifelines to centralised services and I don’t think we can avoid spending big, at least in the short-term, ie at least one 40yr pavement life-cycle into the future.
May 7th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Call me a cynical, but what are the costs of developing an oil field in the remote wilderness of the Amazon.
It sounds uneconomic from that point alone and how have they estimated how much oil and gas is there?
Usually you have to drill several test wells just to get an indication of the size and depth of the field.
Brooklyn Bridge anyone?
May 8th, 2007 at 2:50 am
Mark, geologists have developed some incredible sonar-type techniques for mapping geological formations. they can identify probable oil and gas deposits with remarkable precision. but it can’t be a very big field if its only worth 350 mil a year. it would probably cost that much to build a pipeline to get the black stuff to a port.
we’d probably get better value for money developing enhanced geothermal power plants that extract the heat from hot rocks several km below ground, especially if they use co2 rather than water as the heat transfer carrier. the costs drop dramatically if you dont have to worry about how much carrier dissipates into the rocks 3km underground. seems like the perfect way to clean up coal power stations and extend their economic life so you basicly get the geothermal power for free from the carbon credits.