SEEN's Bulletin on Fossil Fuel Projects and Development Aid

Sink or Swim

November 4, 1999
Last day of Bonn climate negotiations for COP-5
by Daphne Wysham

If this problem of climate change is, as the Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere stated in 1988, "second only to global nuclear war" in its impact on the planet, we're in hot water. And it's only getting hotter.

At a time when cyclones are killing thousands in India and floods are ravaging Vietnam, the largest development lender in the world, the World Bank, calmly affirms that the billions of dollars it invests in fossil fuels are a wise investment. They clearly get the picture: climate change exists and the poorest are at greatest risk. Unlike the fossil fuel industry, they admit this much.

Furthermore, the World Bank thinks it is a big player in the solution because their mission is to help the poor. But their solution is basically, as they told environmental groups today, "sink o  swim." The rich will survive, so the Bank needs to make sure it throws more money at poor countries to help them get rich quick in order to adapt to the problem. It doesn't matter if that money is going into coal, oil and gas and is creating a feedback loop of rising greenhouse gas emissions. Only money will save us.

Then there's Chevron, whose lobbyists are here in force, and handing out succinct, bulleted documents arguing that they should get credit--financial credit, that is-- for caring about the environment in the Niger Delta.

Chevron is a company that, together with Shell and other oil companies, has been flaring gas in the Niger Delta for decades, and polluting the air and water. Gas flares in Nigeria result in more greenhouse gases being emitted per year than all of the rest of Africa combined. Chevron is the same company that has admitted to a US Congressman to providing the helicopters, boats and other hardware and giving the orders to shoot unarmed demonstrators in the Delta, protesting, among other things, the non-stop gas flares. Chevron did this twice, once in 1999, once in 1998.

Here in Bonn, Chevron is lobbying government officials to get *credit* under the newly minted "Clean Development Mechanism" (CDM) for turning off these Niger Delta gas flares. In other words, they want to now swap the right to pollute from Nigeria to some other part of the world, and profit from doing what they should have done long ago. The World Bank is rumored to be
helping them with this scheme.

Then there's the nuclear industry, which is here in force, and sees itself as a viable solution to climate change. They, too, want to get in on emissions trading under the CDM, making nuclear power seem less extravagantly expensive than it is. Nevermind what it means when GE ships nukes to India or Pakistan; nevermind Chernobyl. Put a happy face on a nuclear power plant, as the nuclear industry has done in their displays that greet COP-5 attendees, and suddenly nukes seem as benign as a spring breeze.

Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) are up against an army of well-heeled BNGOs (Business NGOS), who have time to sit in on our meetings, while simultaneously monitoring the other numerous meetings; they have the forces to work into the wee hours of the morning, outlasting exhausted ENGOs, when many of those critical word changes in final documents make all the
difference.

They have the access to power to anticipate the spin, and offer their own sophisticated  counter-spin to the few journalists who care to cover these conferences. As one journalist commented yesterday, "When the major news development here is new language on a mechanism [for climate change mitigation], it's hard to make your editors--much less, the readers-- care."

It seems humankind has finally created a problem that our decision-makers and opinion leaders have deemed too big--or too boring-- to solve. All we can do, as the seas rise, and the winds grow more fierce, is tinker at the margins, and tell those who care to listen to get a big lifeboat.

Daphne Wysham (dwysham@seen.org) is a research fellow with the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and a fellow at the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam.

Return to top