Here's the deal. Ecuador is a poor country and needs money for development. A rich supply of oil under its eastern lowlands is an obvious source of that money, and in recent years, Ecuador has derived 40 per cent of its national income from oil revenues.
Now oil companies have identified a vast supply of oil beneath the Yasuni National Park. Jackpot! Well, yes and no. The problem is Yasuni is one of the most biodiverse spots on earth. Maybe THE most biodiverse. This is the upper Amazon, a place where cool moist cloudforest tumbles down the eastern slopes of the Andes into steaming rainforest.
The White House oil commission has concluded that cost-cutting by BP was at least partly to blame for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. It identified nine decisions that increased risk; BP was involved in all nine decisions. Seven of those decisions saved time and (hence) money.
The conclusion could expose BP to billions more in compensation claims.
As we enter the era of peak oil, with extraction moving to ever-more-inaccessible places, the fear is that we'll see more of these sort of disasters in the coming years.
But the commission refused to back calls for a halt to all offshore drilling - and, as a telling detail is towards the bottom of this follow-up article in The Guardian, notes that BP shares rose 2.8 per cent on the news.
In my previous blog, I wondered if the Deepwater Horizon oil spill might create a mood among politicians and the public in the US to support a genuine drive for clean energy. Keep an eye on public opinion in the US in the coming months.
The UK has announced an energy policy featuring 10 new sites for nuclear power stations, investment in clean coal (with a promise of no new coal-fired power stations without clean coal) and 30 per cent renewables (mainly wind) by 2020. The UK plans to generate 40 per cent of its energy from nuclear power by 2025.
You wake up to a beautiful day, blue skies and birds singing. Then you read something like this, an article about oil exploration in the western Amazon. In Peru, 72 per cent of the country's Amazon region has been approved for oil exploration - most of it since 2003.
