Brooke Jarvis, YES Magazine.

Rafael Correa won the Ecuadorian presidency on the strength of his promises to deliver much-needed social programs to his country’s largely impoverished population. He also pledged to protect Ecuador’s natural heritage of biodiversity. Add to this political mix a lot of foreign debt and a billion or more barrels of oil located under a UNESCO bioreserve in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and it’s clear why some observers saw the nation as caught in a classic stalemate between development and environment.

Amidst her welcome critique of the biofuel mania, Vandana Shiva's ZNet commentary last month (December 13, 2007) also made this point: "The Kyoto Protocol totally avoided the material challenge of stopping activities that lead to higher emissions and the political challenge of regulation of the polluters and making the polluters pay in accordance with principles adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio.  Instead, Kyoto put in place the mechanism of emissions trading which in effect rewarded the polluters by assigning them rights to the atmosphere and trading in these rights to pollute."

Joan Martinez-Alier and Leah Temper

Kyoto has failed. Despite so many admonitions from the IPCC, the reality is that emissions of carbon dioxide in the world are going up by over 3 per cent per year. This is the failure of the countries that signed up to Kyoto, and even more so, of those like the United States who stayed outside the timid Kyoto framework, and also of those not included in Annex I of the Rio de Janeiro treaty of 1992.

SPEECH OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF ECUADOR EXCELLENCY RAFAEL CORREA

HIGH LEVEL DIALOGUE ON CLIMATE CHANGE OF THE 62 PERIOD OF SESSIONS OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS

New York, September 24th, 2007 

The Ecuadorean government has begun negotiating with oil companies interested in bringing that oil to the surface, although President Rafael Correa says his preferred option would be to leave the reserves untouched.