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Plan to Ban Oil Drilling in Amazon Is Dropped

August 16, 2013 by

The plan won applause from environmentalists, and international luminaries like Bo Derek and Leonardo DiCaprio opened their wallets. The plan was backed by the United Nations, but governments generally balked at contributing, and only $13 million was collected.

“The world has failed us,” President Correa said as he withdrew the offer in a nationally televised news conference on Thursday night. “With deep sadness but also with absolute responsibility to our people and history, I have had to take one of the hardest decisions of my government.”

The pioneering effort was administered by the United Nations Development Program. It was originally set up after potential reserves of nearly 800 million barrels of oil were found in the Yasuni national park, which is inhabited by two isolated Indian tribes.

Its goal was not only to protect a pristine rain forest with a rich mix of wildlife and plant life but also to ease future climate change by preventing more than 400 million tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere. The park was designated a world biosphere reserve by Unesco in the late 1980s.

Local and international environmentalists expressed disappointment with President Correa’s decision, and hundreds of protesters gathered outside the presidential palace in Quito, the nation’s capital.

“It could have been used as a model for other sensitive areas,” said Matt Finer, a scientist with the Center for International Environmental Law, referring to the fund. “But now that it has failed, there is really no alternative model that is attractive to governments unable or unwilling to forgo drilling solely on ecological grounds.”

Oil pollution in the Ecuadorean jungles has been highlighted by two decades of lawsuits against Chevron, whose predecessor, Texaco, worked as a partner with Petroecuador, the state oil company, in the 1970s before it was acquired by Chevron.

Chevron lost a case in an Ecuadorean court two years ago, but it has refused to pay more than $18 billion in damages. It argued that Texaco had done a cleanup and that most of the pollution that was left was caused by Petroecuador after Texaco left. Enforcement proceedings are at various stages in several countries since Chevron has no assets in Ecuador.

President Correa has publicly sided with Amazon residents who complain that their homelands were spoiled. But the Ecuadorean government still relies on oil for one-third of its tax revenue, and the government is running a large budget deficit. Ecuadorean oil production is about 500,000 barrels a day, making it the fifth-largest producer in South America. Although President Correa is a frequent critic of the United States and its foreign policy, most Ecuadorean oil exports go to the United States.

The three oil fields in the park represent roughly a fifth of the country’s 7.2 billion barrels of oil reserves and could generate more than $7 billion in revenue over a 10-year period, according to Ecuadorean oil experts.

China, which has become the largest source of financing for the Ecuadorean government as it seeks to secure more oil supplies from Latin America, is a likely beneficiary of any increased Ecuadorean production. In July, Ecuador obtained a $2 billion loan from the China Development Bank in exchange for nearly 40,000 barrels a day of oil from Ecuador to PetroChina over two years.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/energy-environment/ecuador-drops-plan-to-ban-drilling-in-jungle.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Greeley Journal: Supporting Oil and Gas, but Resisting Encroachment

June 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

In the depths of the recession, a new wave of drilling took hold across farm fields and the high plains, helping to revive the city’s straggling economy. Unemployment is still stuck at 7.5 percent, but is down from highs of more than 10 percent. And local officials estimate that one in nine jobs is somehow tied to the drilling boom. Homes are selling again, and hotels are nearly full.

“We had better occupancy than Vail did during the ski season,” said Greeley’s mayor, Tom Norton.

But this spring, an energy company proposed sinking 16 wells next to a neighborhood of winding cul-de-sacs, pastel homes and the Family FunPlex recreation center. And in this energy-friendly town, an unlikely resistance was born.

“These wells are going to be here for a long time,” said Wendy Highby, a librarian at the University of Northern Colorado who joined a group of residents to oppose the project. “They’re what we’re leaving to our children.”

The wells in the Fox Run neighborhood on Greeley’s western fringe would hardly be the first ones drilled here. Energy companies have drilled in northern Colorado for more than three decades, and Greeley is ringed by about 20,000 oil and gas wells.

About 425 wells are tucked within the city limits, along roadsides and near industrial parks and commercial strips, and that number is expected to grow to 1,600 in coming years. Empty lots near strip malls are scheduled for drilling, and a vacant patch of grass near graduate-student housing on the city’s east side bears this sign: “Future Drilling Site.”

As companies here and across the energy-rich West look for new places to drill, they are increasingly looking toward more densely populated areas, and bumping into environmentalists and homeowners. In a study last year, the environmental advocacy group Western Resource Advocates found that 32 schools in northern Colorado were within 1,000 feet of a well.

“These cities are the last open bastions where they can drill,” said Mark Schreibman, who created a community group to oppose the drilling in Greeley. “They’re the only places left. Now they’re finding themselves under siege.”

As wells have sprouted in cities across northern Colorado, some towns have pushed for bans on the drilling technique known as fracking, in which highly pressurized water, sand and chemicals are pumped into the ground to crack open rock formations and pull out the minerals. Last week, the liberal college town of Boulder passed a one-year ban on fracking.

Others have embraced the boom’s royalty checks and tax payments, crediting drilling for the new grocery store in Platteville, the huge lunch crowds in Ault or the reopened Tumble Weed Café in Nunn.

Greeley and drilling have a complicated history. In the mid-1980s, the city banned drilling inside its borders, a move that was overturned by Colorado’s highest court after a long and expensive legal battle with energy companies. Since then, the city has passed rules to manage drilling and has learned to coexist with the industry, and even embrace it.

Last year, Greeley collected $3.3 million from oil and gas operations, and it estimates that energy production will generate $429 million in tax revenue over the next 25 years. The University of Northern Colorado and school districts inside Greeley have leased out their drilling rights, and this spring huge “thumper trucks” rolled through the streets, sending seismic jolts deep into the ground to see where mineral deposits might lie.

This winter, when Colorado’s oil and gas commission passed new rules requiring 500-foot setbacks between new wells and homes, Mayor Norton publicly opposed the changes. He argued that they would hurt development and city planning and would undermine local governments.

Last year, a drilling rig rose like a beanstalk about 1,000 feet from Mr. Norton’s home. The nights were filled with clanking and thudding as trucks came and went and as workers bored into the ground and pumped fracking fluid into the well. It was not bliss, he said, but he and his neighbors got by.

“It’s not that you want them there,” he said, “but you’ve got to put them someplace.”

Residents are fiercely divided on that point. At a packed meeting last month to discuss the drilling project in Fox Run, some spoke in favor of the economic benefits of oil and gas development. Dozens of others urged city officials to reject the proposal, saying the flurry of new wells would forever damage their city of parks and walking paths.

Logan Richardson, the vice president of the energy company Mineral Resources, promised to do everything possible to keep the noise down and mask the drilling near Fox Run. He said the company would build a fence and plant trees and was making extensive efforts to protect the environment around the well sites.

Despite strong public objection, city officials unanimously approved the new wells. And now, inside the house that she and her husband built six years ago, Karen Janata is bracing for what comes next. The couple moved to Greeley from Illinois to be close to their children and grandchildren, and loved their home’s mountain views and sunny suburban charm. She wonders whether all that will survive after the drilling rigs arrive.

“I’m just devastated by this,” Ms. Janata said. “I would move out of Greeley tomorrow if I could.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/us/supporting-oil-and-gas-but-resisting-encroachment.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

U.S. and European Union to Negotiate Settlements in Chinese Solar Panel Cases

May 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

HONG KONG — The Obama administration and the European Union have each decided to negotiate settlements with China in the world’s largest antidumping and antisubsidy trade cases involving China’s roughly $30 billion a year in solar panel shipments to the West, officials and trade advisers in Beijing, Brussels and Washington said.

The plan that is starting to take shape would essentially carve up the global solar panel market into a series of regional markets. It would sharply raise the price of solar panels exported from China, the world’s dominant producer, by requiring Chinese companies to charge more while limiting the total number of solar panels they could ship.

In exchange, Chinese companies would no longer be charged steep taxes on their exports of solar panels. The United States is already collecting tariffs totaling about 30 percent while the European Union is expected to impose similar tariffs of about 50 percent on June 5, and may backdate them to March 5.

Parallel decisions by the Obama administration and the European Union to separately negotiate high prices for imported solar panels may prove unpopular among environmentalists. Some environmental groups are already upset that the tariffs have made solar energy less affordable, which makes it less competitive with more polluting fossil fuels.

Huge shipments from China have driven solar panel prices down by three-quarters in the last four years. American and European producers contend that much of that decline represents the effect of Chinese government subsidies and Chinese dumping of solar panels below the cost of producing them, which means that a negotiated settlement could need to push prices up significantly.

The goal of the current tariffs, and of the price and quantity regulations that could replace them, is to protect American and European manufacturers from what they and the Obama administration describe as unfair competition. Western manufacturers and the administration say that Chinese solar panels are heavily subsidized by the Chinese government and then dumped in foreign markets at prices far below the cost of production.

Two dozen American and European solar panel manufacturers have already cut back production or gone bankrupt in the last three years, moves widely attributed to Chinese imports.

Francisco Sanchez, the under secretary of commerce for international trade, has just flown to Beijing for a visit to discuss civilian nuclear power trade issues, people with a detailed knowledge of his visit said. Mr. Sanchez has a long agenda of bilateral trade issues to discuss that includes mentioning an American interest in negotiations, a person with detailed knowledge of his visit said.

The Commerce Department deferred on Monday to the United States trade representative’s office about what Mr. Sanchez would say in Beijing about solar panels.

The Obama administration is in the earliest stages of sounding out Congress about the shift toward replacing tariffs with a negotiated settlement. Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat whose state is a center of solar panel production, said that he supported a negotiated deal.

“We are really at a fork in the road with respect to producing renewable energy technology in the United States,” he said. “This is the moment for the administration to obtain a global agreement that levels the playing field for American producers and provides the certainty needed for America’s renewable energy, and solar sector in particular, to survive.”

Chinese producers have partly bypassed the American tariffs by performing one stage in the solar panel manufacturing process outside mainland China: turning solar wafers into solar cells in nearby Taiwan.

A negotiated deal would close the loophole in the American tariffs; the European trade case does not have the same loophole.

China has retaliated for American and European tariffs on solar panels by moving to impose steep tariffs on imports of the main raw material for solar panels, polysilicon. A negotiated settlement would also involve China’s removal of these retaliatory tariffs.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/global/us-and-european-union-set-to-negotiate-settlements-in-chinese-solar-panel-cases.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

E.P.A. Chief Stands Firm as Tough Rules Loom

July 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

She is working under intense pressure from opponents in Congress, from powerful industries, from impatient environmentalists and from the Supreme Court, which just affirmed the agency’s duty to address global warming emissions, a project that carries profound economic implications.

The new rules will roll out just as President Obama’s re-election campaign is getting under way, with a White House highly sensitive to the probability of political damage from a flood of government mandates that will strike particularly hard at the manufacturing sector in states crucial to the 2012 election.

No other cabinet officer is in as lonely or uncomfortable a position as Ms. Jackson, who has been left, as one adviser put it, behind enemy lines with only science, the law and a small band of loyal lieutenants to support her.

Ms. Jackson describes the job as draining but says there are certain principles she will not compromise, including rapid and vigorous enforcement of some of the most far-reaching health-related rules ever considered by the agency.

“The only thing worse than no E.P.A. is an E.P.A. that exists and doesn’t do its job — it becomes just a placebo,” she said last week in an hourlong interview in Houston. “We are doing our job.”

Although she has not met with the president privately since February, Ms. Jackson said she was confident that he would back her on the tough decisions she had to make. “All of us are mindful that he has a lot of things to do,” she said.

Attacks on her and her agency have become a central part of the Republican playbook, but she said she wanted no sympathy.

“Any E.P.A. director sits at the intersection of some very important issues — air pollution, clean water, and whether businesses can survive,” said Ms. Jackson, a chemical engineer trained at Tulane and Princeton Universities and a former director of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. “No one knows this job unless they’ve sat in the seat.”

Ms. Jackson said she intended to go forward with new, tougher air- and water-quality rules, including those that address climate change, despite Congressional efforts to override her authority and even a White House initiative to weed out overly burdensome regulations.

The first of these new rules is expected to be announced Thursday, imposing tighter restrictions on soot and smog emissions from coal-burning power plants in 31 states east of the Rockies. The regulation is expected to lead to the closing of several older plants and will require the installation of scrubbers at many of those that remain in operation. One former E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly, who served under the first President George Bush, is a sometime adviser to Ms. Jackson. He said she was taking fire from all sides.

“She’s got three very large challenges,” Mr. Reilly said. “First, she’s got to administer the Clean Air Act to try to accomplish something for which it was never designed, the control of carbon dioxide, a difficult regulatory challenge in itself. Second, she has to do that and cope with all these other regulations which are not of her making and have come to land on her desk in a climate of intense political polarization and economic distress.”

“And the third challenge,” he continued, “is that the White House — any White House — doesn’t want to hear an awful lot from the E.P.A. It’s not an agency that ever makes friends for a president. In the cabinet room, many of the secretaries got along with each other, but they all had an argument with me. It’s the nature of the job.”

Mr. Reilly said the White House had left Ms. Jackson out on a limb when it failed to push hard for the cap-and-trade climate change bill that passed the House in 2009 but stalled in the Senate last year. Administration officials had argued that legislation was far superior to agency regulation as a means of addressing climate-altering emissions. But when the bill ran up against bipartisan opposition in the Senate, Mr. Reilly said, “the White House didn’t lift a finger,” an assertion administration officials dispute.

The White House said that it fully supported the agency’s aggressive standards for a variety of pollutants to protect public health and the environment and denied that it was resisting further regulatory action for political reasons.

“It’s simply a matter of choosing the health and safety of the American people over polluters,” Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement, “and doing so in a common-sense way that allows us to protect public health while also growing the economy — which will continue to be a shared goal of this entire administration.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4845a8b47e2c7c28ede7a1422303840f

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,