Coal dust coats the trees that the local tribe considers sacred. The open pit mine dug in eastern India with the support of the World Bank, surrounds the grove where the people believe the spirits of their ancestors reside. The villagers have been involuntarily resettled to colonies where they have little to do but mourn their lost connection to the land that supported and fed them for thousands of years.

A dictator in Chad buys arms to kill his own people. The money comes from proceeds from an oil pipeline funded by the World Bank, and despite assurances that this could never happen.

Fishing and small-scale agriculture used to be a way of life for the indigenous people of the Niger Delta. Now, after 45 years of oil spills and gas flares, their soil, water, and air is polluted, their communities torn by conflict. The World Bank's solution? Build a new pipeline and provide more support for the oil industry.

India, Chad and Nigeria. Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and Bolivia. Around the world, when the World Bank and Big Oil or King Coal get together, the story is the same: Projects that were supposed to alleviate poverty and create wealth instead enrich corrupt government officials and corporations, while impoverishing local peoples, polluting their environments, and violating their rights.

Fossil fuels-oil, gas and coal-are the number one cause of global warming. Global warming is predicted to cause the greatest harm-flooding, drought, starvation, rising sea levels, an increase in diseases-to the poorest in the global South. Like the Bush/Cheney administration, The World Bank acknowledges that global warming is a serious threat. Nevertheless, it continues to fuel the problem.

Public funding for fossil fuels is unnecessary; these industries are awash in private capital. It is also antithetical to the mission of the World Bank: poverty alleviation and sustainable development. While the World Bank justifies its actions claiming it is delivering energy to the poorest 2 billion who are without power and live in rural areas, less than five percent of its energy lending is targeted at the rural poor. NGOs and people's organizations around the world are demanding that support for fossil fuel projects be phased out rapidly, and be accompanied by a dramatic increase in funding for clean, renewable sources of energy to meet the needs of the world's poorest people.

THE BANK, BIG OIL, and KING COAL

The World Bank Group (IBRD, IFC, IDA, MIGA) currently devotes approximately 20% of its lending to energy related projects, of which the overwhelming majority is devoted to projects that extract or burn fossil fuels. Overall, between 1992 and the present, the World Bank Group approved funding for more than $18.5 billion in oil, gas, and coal extraction and power projects in developing countries - over 17 times more than the Bank spent on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.

Beginning in 1998, rising awareness of the Bank Group's role in fueling climate change has led to some reduction of investment in fossil fuels by the IBRD and the IDA. At the IFC and MIGA, however, little has changed: since 1998, the World Bank agencies backed corporate oil, coal, and gas projects to the tune of $3.5 billion.

Overall, fossil fuel projects have three critical negative impacts:

• Developmental impacts: Bank lending for fossil fuel projects runs directly counter to the Bank's stated mission of helping the poor. A recent internal paper commissioned by the IFC noted that: "The notion that governments invest incremental rents/returns from extractive industries profitably and for the benefit of poor people is all too often more of an aspiration than a reality." The poor are the most likely to be forced off of their land and made homeless by oil, gas, and mining projects. They are the most likely to live in polluted surroundings and the least empowered to demand fair compensation or a share in the revenue from oil, gas and mining projects. A forthcoming study from Oxfam further notes that the more heavily countries rely on oil and minerals exports, the worse they seem to do on health, education and income.
• Environmental impacts: Environmentalists have long had reason to be concerned about the local and global impacts of fossil fuel extraction. Oil spills, tailing ponds, toxic emissions, and other local impacts are the well-documented rule around most extractive projects of this nature. World Bank fossil fuel projects financed from 1992 to 1998 will ultimately release 37.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide, an amount greater than all current annual global fossil fuel emissions. We are all victims of and affected by these projects.
• Human Rights impacts: There is an alarming record of human rights abuses by governments and corporations associated with fossil fuel operations, resulting in forced relocation, and the brutal and sometimes deadly repression of critics. Citizens in Chad and Cameroon voiced loud concerns to the World Bank that the financing and revenues for the Chad-Cameroon oil project would fuel an ongoing civil war and intimidation of citizens in affected communities. These fears were justified when it was revealed that the President of Chad had spent millions of dollars of project funds on weapons, despite promises to the contrary. Scholars have examined the relationship between corruption, authoritarian governments, governance, conflict and extractive industries and found strong evidence for a repression effect, which holds that resource wealth retards democratization by enabling the government to better fund the apparatus of repression.

Research by the Institute for Policy Studies, and other groups critiquing the pattern of international financial institution (IFI) investments in oil, gas and coal projects concludes that these projects will vastly accelerate global warming, while also choking off investment in renewable energy and recklessly endangering and displacing local people and environments. They advocate shifting the investments away from these carbon-intensive investments and toward emission-free renewables as a way of ensuring these energy options are affordable for the world's poorest countries.

In response to such criticism, the World Bank recently began a "strategic review" of its investments in the oil, gas and mining sectors. According to the Bank's own reports, lending in these areas represents a "clear and present danger" because of "global concern over inherent sustainability of extractive industries" and "compelling evidence of accelerating global warming." Environmentalists and human rights advocates remain skeptical of the efficacy of reviews unless the critical question of whether to lend to these industries at all is on the table.

There is no reason why the richest corporations on the planet deserve any form of public subsidy from the World Bank or any other public institution to continue to pump out more oil, gas and coal. We need to invest our public money in the public good. For the poorest who will be most dramatically and directly harmed by climate change, the greatest public good is to invest every spare dollar in renewables and energy efficiency now.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

1. Get involved in the World Bank Bonds Boycott. Organize your school, union, local government, or investment house to boycott World Bank Bonds until they stop investing in fossil fuels. Visit www.worldbankboycott.org for more information.
2. Tell the World Bank that it needs to stop lending for oil, mining, and gas projects immediately. Write to Emil Salim, Extractive Industries Review at <esalim@eireview.org>
3. Get involved with the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network. www.seen.org
4. Join the growing movement to boycott ExxonMobil - the World Bank's partners in the devastating Chad-Cameroon pipeline project. www.pressurepoint.org

For more information and sources: Institute for Policy Studies / SEEN 202-234-9382

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