Gringo View: how much will US$1,000,000,000,000 (that’s trillion) buy?

(Opinion) Put yourself in the Gucci shoes of a billionaire and imagine how life would change if you had only one super yacht instead of two.

And imagine how good you would feel if the approximately thirteen million dollars you would have saved were put to the good use of saving the planet and its diversity of nature.

Think of it this way.

You wake up one morning to find you are now the president of a small and poor Latin American country.

You marvel that a treasured parcel of your pristine land is one of Earth’s most biologically diverse spots.

It’s home to more than 2,000 species of trees and shrubbery, 204 mammal species, 610 species of birds, 121 reptile species, 150 amphibian species, and more than 250 fish species.

In one hectare.

For example, there have been 650 tree species recorded, which represents more than those found in the US.

And all this marvelous biodiversity is sitting snugly on a pool of 846 million barrels of heavy crude oil with a value of US$3.6 billion, money that would go a long way to making it possible for you to help your people’s health, education, and infrastructure.

The money could also be used to aid existing communities to sustain their lives, reduce illegal hunting and logging that had gone on for years, and let nature sustain itself.

Let’s be honest.

US$3.6 billion is chicken feed, peanuts, and pocket change for a billionaire like you. But it could fund not drilling for oil in an environmentally threatened corner of the globe.

In 2007, the president of tiny Ecuador, Rafael Correa, was confronted with this dilemma.

He was being squeezed by pressure from both sides, environmental interests, and the fat checkbook of the oil companies.

It was time to think outside the box.

That’s just what Rafael Correa did. He came up with an inventive, everybody wins scheme: leave the land alone and the oil in the ground and fund Ecuador for Micky Mouse money, half the oil’s value, US$3.6 billion, the cost of about 275 super yachts which nobody wants anyway.

The prestigious Smithsonian Magazine described the plan as an elegant way to help tackle climate change.

It was supported by the fact that leaving that oil in the ground would avoid some 410 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions going into the atmosphere.

It was a great idea that earned rounds of applause for the initiative and lavish promises of funding. That was until the nay-sayers examined the proposal and started shooting holes.

Not surprisingly, they asked hard questions about how Ecuador’s plan would actually work in practice.

They understandably picked holes in where the money might go, and whether Ecuador could be trusted to keep the oil in the ground and not cheat as Latin American countries often have.

Uncovered by Wikileaks in 2009, a US State Department cable in 2009 noted that U.S. officials were dubious about the “lack of clarity on the guarantees from the Ecuadorian government”.

The question was even asked whether Ecuador was as good a place to invest in some other favorite of the plan’s examiners was championed.

That the United States looked to Ecuador’s other oil-producing areas for about 3 percent of net U.S. imports – a quarter of a million barrels of Ecuadorian crude per day – might or might not have had any influence on the situation.

There can be little doubt about it. Paying poorer countries to keep their fossil fuel resources unexploited could be one of the most cost-effective ways of tackling climate change. But the weight of the argument doesn’t always move the scale in its favor.

There is always a delicate balance between money and nature; sadly, money almost always wins.

Investment in the Ecuadorian initiative was slow to materialize.

After a few years of broken promises, the disheartened president was forced to proclaim, “The world has failed us,” Correa approved oil drilling in previously untouched parts of the park.

While Yasuní National Park now welcomes eco-tourists, it is clearly in danger despite serious efforts not to let oil drilling impact the land.

Sympathetic as you are to the danger and the big problem of balancing environmental and commercial priorities, you realize it’s too big a problem even for a billionaire of your ilk to solve.

Better, you decide, to helicopter off the yacht and jet to Davos to join the annual gabfest of the world’s richest and most powerful industry and world leaders at the World Economic Forum, an amazing US$185 million-a-year conference. Those guys ought to be able to solve the problem.

Isn’t it about time we asked ourselves how many fewer super yachts and multi-million-dollar conferences would mitigate global warming and save endangered species?