Does Philippe Maystadt have the cushiest job in the EU bureaucracy? For the past eleven years, Maystadt has been president of the European Investment Bank. It is a post that has required him to move from his native Belgium to Luxembourg but that drawback has been compensated for by a handsome salary and a chance to manage one of the largest portfolios held by any international financial institution in the world. The remoteness of the EIB headquarters has many advantages, too: nicely insulated from journalists covering European affairs from Brussels, his activities usually evade scrutiny from the mainstream media.
And so Maystadt was able to depict himself as a valiant eco-warrior last week by publishing data about how the bank delivered “record climate action lending” in 2010. With his statement dutifully regurgitated in business publications, Maystadt could relax safe in the knowledge that none of us journalists are too bothered to ask what the EIB is really up to.
As it happened, the bank dropped strong hints about its real agenda one day earlier. In a separate statement, it announced plans to finance the world’s largest “carbon capture and storage” scheme. Cash for this initiative will be generated through the sale of 300 million licenses to pollute under the EU’s emissions trading system (ETS). The bank does not intend to make public comments on individual beneficiaries of the scheme, according to the statement.
It is certain that much of the funding will be released to the fossil fuels industry, which has been promoting carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a panacea for the global warming that their rapacious activities played a large role in causing. Sure, the concept is a seductive one: instead of releasing heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, these will be buried under the ground where they can do no harm, the theory goes. The flipside of this fantasy is that it offers industrialists an excuse to keep burning as much coal and oil as they want and policy-makers to avoid taking urgent measures.
The scheme being supported by the EIB is called the “New Entrants Reserve” (NER). Documents given to transparency campaigners by Chris Davies, the British MEP who is one of carbon capture’s most vocal advocates, have shown that Shell and BP managed to tweak the terms of reference for the NER in their favour. In February last year, Davies – with more than a little help from his oily friends – clinched a deal with the European Commission and EU governments that at least eight CCS projects would be financed under the NER. As BP’s reputation belly-flopped in the Gulf of Mexico shortly after that deal, it is little wonder that Maystadt’s mandarins want to keep quiet about how they will be shovelling euros into projects designed to aid that corporate despoiler.
In September 2009, José Manuel Barroso undertook to work “more imaginatively” with the EIB in order to address the economic crisis. What the European Commission chief really meant was that he had parked his own imagination in a cul de sac. For senior politicians in Brussels have a habit of calling up Maystadt when they want to be seen throwing money at a problem. So it was no surprise to read an opinion piece that Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, had published in The Financial Times on Valentine’s Day. Her gesture of love to the people who had risen up against their governments in “our southern neighbours, including Egypt” would be to ask the EIB for a dig-out of €1 billion, she wrote.
According to Ashton, these loans will help support democratic transition. Why the hell does she think that loans are an appropriate instrument for that purpose? Under its dictator Hosni Mubarak, Egypt racked up foreign debts of nearly $35 billion, roughly $9 billion of which is owed to EU countries. International law holds that debts incurred in a manner that does not serve the interests of a country’s population should be declared as “odious”. Therefore, the fair thing to do would be to write off that debt once free and fair elections are held in Egypt. Yet instead of tackling that debt burden, Ashton wants to increase it.
Ashton described the potential loans as a “downpayment for reform”, implying that the EIB is on the side of the brave demonstrators who clogged downtown Cairo in recent weeks. That is laughable. Research by the Bretton Woods Project, an anti-poverty group, has documented how the EIB has been at the forefront of a trend whereby international financial institutions have been directing their loans away from public institutions to private firms. In 2000, about 90% of all funding for developing countries from those institutions went to public sources, the remaining 10% to corporations. Within seven years, that ratio was turned on its head, with 60% of such finance allocated to the private sector.
Counterbalance, another campaigning organisation, has shown that many of the firms on the EIB’s loan book operate in tax havens. They include Mopani, a Swiss-owned mining company, that has been taking its profits from copper extraction in Zambia out of Africa, without paying taxes, according to an audit paper made public earlier this month. This is not the first time that the EIB has been found abetting the plundering of Africa’s resources, and it won’t be the last. Shouldn’t we be paying a bit more attention to how this bank behaves?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 27 February – 5 March 2011
Showing posts with label Shell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shell. Show all posts
Monday, February 28, 2011
Friday, October 29, 2010
Corporate power bleeds Canada dry
Barely noticed by most media outlets, top corporations are finding ways to assert their control over policies nominally designed to serve public interests. Unglamorous trade talks between the European Union and Canada offer a prime example of the headway they are making. Since their launch in Prague last year, these negotiations have largely followed an agenda drawn up by the European Services Forum (ESF). Bringing together Goldman Sachs, IBM, Vodafone and Deutsche Bank, the ESF is determined to usher in a trans-Atlantic investment regime where elected institutions play second fiddle to unaccountable chief executives.
The forum’s principal recommendation is that an EU-Canada trade deal should be modelled on the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). More specifically, it wants chapter 11 of NAFTA to be copied and pasted into an EU-Canada accord. That chapter facilitates private firms to sue any of the three governments that signed NAFTA – the US, Canada or Mexico – if obstacles to making profits are encountered. The courts of arbitration provided for by the chapter can issue legally binding verdicts after hearings held in camera. If the ESF has its way, firms would also be able to put the European Union in the dock.
The likely implications of the ESF’s demands can be foreseen by examining the case law for NAFTA. When an American waste management company called Metalclad was ordered to cease building a toxic dump in Mexico during the 1990s, it initiated proceedings against the Mexican government. Even though there were sound reasons – for protecting human health and preventing soil and water pollution - why Metalclad had been told to stop work on a site that was already contaminated, a NAFTA tribunal found that Mexico had failed to ensure there was a “clear, transparent and predictable framework for foreign investors.” And so Metalclad was awarded almost $17million.
The EU-Canada talks cannot be viewed in isolation from a discussion taking place among Brussels officials about how imports of tar sands from the Canadian province of Alberta should be regulated. Last year a European Commission paper proposing revisions to an EU fuel quality law stated that petrol derived from tar sands would have a 20% greater effect on the climate than conventional petrol. But this warning was removed from later versions of the paper after Ross Hornby, Canada’s ambassador to the EU, objected. Hornby signalled that Canada would retaliate if a “barrier” to trade in tar sands was erected.
Should the EU-Canada trade deal be tailored to satisfy big business, Shell and other energy companies could litigate against measures that impede them from selling tar sands. And so the EU would be giving its tacit blessing to the large-scale vandalism being planned in Alberta, where an expansive boreal forest – one quarter of the world’s remaining undisturbed forest – is under threat. Operations that encroach into this ecosystem will not only harm bears, caribou and lynx but the First Nations communities, who are already suffering heightened incidences of cancer because of exposure to naphthenic acid, a constituent of petroleum that becomes concentrated in the hot water required to process tar sands.
Similarly, it is conceivable that Europe’s restrictions on genetically modified (GM) foods could be one of the first targets of aggrieved corporations once the EU-Canada deal comes into effect. Whereas the planting of GM crops can only be authorised in the EU after their probable ecological consequences have been assessed, the safeguards in Canada are considerably less robust. Last year SmartStax, a new corn designed by Monsanto and Dow Chemicals to resist a variety of different pesticides, was authorised in Canada without having to go through the health and environment checks required in Europe.
As its contribution to the trade talks, Monsanto’s Canadian subsidiary has advocated that the EU and Canada would recognise each other’s standards, rather than having to introduce anything more rigorous than those currently in place. This position has been endorsed by the Canada Europe Roundtable for Business, an influential lobby group in both Brussels and Ottawa.
The strategy being pursued by the captains of industry is all the more troubling, when one considers that they are sneakily trying to attain objectives that have been rejected by separate international fora. In a triumph for the so-called anti-globalisation movement, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was shelved in the late 1990s. Discussed at the level of the World Trade Organisation, that treaty was also designed to give corporations the power to counter green or social rules they regarded as pesky.
Recently, however, a letter signed by prominent writers and activists such as Naomi Klein, Susan George and José Bové (now a French MEP) dubbed the draft EU-Canada agreement a “carbon copy” of the MAI. Both contain the same “judicial monstrosity”, the letter noted.
Often the EU’s representatives seek to portray themselves as slightly more progressive than their north American peers by bragging of how they have set deeper targets for greenhouse gas reductions or of how they are committed to maintaining a “social market” economy. Yet in reality, they are just as ideologically blinkered as Stephen Harper and his right-wing government in Canada. It was the European side, for example, which insisted that public procurement markets at both federal and provincial levels in Canada should be opened up to European competitors. Although Canada’s 10 provincial governments were not party to the NAFTA talks, they are participating in the trade discussions with the EU.
In the past few weeks, the EU has complained about entirely reasonable efforts by the Montreal authorities to ensure that new trains for its subway were made in Quebec. If the EU’s arm-twisting pays off, it will be illegal for such tenders to contain “buy local” caveats in the future, while a range of other vital services – including healthcare and water – will be opened to competition. Michael Moore’s film “Sicko” indicated that politicians across the political spectrum in Canada regarded access to affordable healthcare as a basic right. That right would be harder to protect once the business of keeping people alive is handed over to the private insurance industry.
The EU-Canada talks should be viewed against the backdrop of the wider external trade policy being pursued by the European Commission. In 2006, Peter Mandelson, then the EU’s trade chief, published a strategy known as Global Europe. It committed the Union to attack relentlessly any obstacles encountered by corporations doing business abroad. Brussels officials have had no qualms about seeking counsel from some of the least ethical players in the marketplace. When the Commission held a conference in 2008 to evaluate the first two years of Global Europe, the vehicle-maker Caterpillar was invited to thunder against air pollution standards it felt should not apply to its products. None of the conference speakers saw fit to query if Caterpillar, provider of the specially designed bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes, was a suitable source of advice.
During November, a follow-up paper to Global Europe will be published by the current EU trade commissioner Karel de Gucht. It is expected that this will recommend sticking to the objectives set by Mandelson, though to enlarge the geographical focus of trade policy. With a free trade agreement with South Korea in the bag though encountering difficulties winning approval from the European Parliament) and one with India likely to be clinched next year, the European Commission is eyeing potential deals with China and Japan.
Heedless to regional variations within its negotiating “partners”, the EU has been striving to ram through a series of largely identical trade deals. At the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, it has been pressurising India into imposing patents on medicines in a way that would jeopardise its status as a leading manufacturer of generic drugs for the world’s poor. Some African governments, meanwhile, have accused the EU of trying to bully them into accepting liberalisation plans they regard as inimical to their economic development. And the Union has gone ahead and finalised a free trade agreement with Colombia, despite receiving voluminous evidence from human rights watchdogs documenting how the Bogota authorities have connived in numerous violent attacks on trade unionists.
Back in 1999, protesters fighting the ‘Battle of Seattle’ raised many awkward questions about how the rules of world commerce had been rigged to benefit the super-rich. Global trade talks have been at a standstill for most of the subsequent decade, yet that doesn’t mean the rigging has stopped. Rather, it is taking place in a greater number of venues, making resistance to it increasingly difficult, yet no less urgent.
·First published by openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net), 29 October 2010
The forum’s principal recommendation is that an EU-Canada trade deal should be modelled on the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). More specifically, it wants chapter 11 of NAFTA to be copied and pasted into an EU-Canada accord. That chapter facilitates private firms to sue any of the three governments that signed NAFTA – the US, Canada or Mexico – if obstacles to making profits are encountered. The courts of arbitration provided for by the chapter can issue legally binding verdicts after hearings held in camera. If the ESF has its way, firms would also be able to put the European Union in the dock.
The likely implications of the ESF’s demands can be foreseen by examining the case law for NAFTA. When an American waste management company called Metalclad was ordered to cease building a toxic dump in Mexico during the 1990s, it initiated proceedings against the Mexican government. Even though there were sound reasons – for protecting human health and preventing soil and water pollution - why Metalclad had been told to stop work on a site that was already contaminated, a NAFTA tribunal found that Mexico had failed to ensure there was a “clear, transparent and predictable framework for foreign investors.” And so Metalclad was awarded almost $17million.
The EU-Canada talks cannot be viewed in isolation from a discussion taking place among Brussels officials about how imports of tar sands from the Canadian province of Alberta should be regulated. Last year a European Commission paper proposing revisions to an EU fuel quality law stated that petrol derived from tar sands would have a 20% greater effect on the climate than conventional petrol. But this warning was removed from later versions of the paper after Ross Hornby, Canada’s ambassador to the EU, objected. Hornby signalled that Canada would retaliate if a “barrier” to trade in tar sands was erected.
Should the EU-Canada trade deal be tailored to satisfy big business, Shell and other energy companies could litigate against measures that impede them from selling tar sands. And so the EU would be giving its tacit blessing to the large-scale vandalism being planned in Alberta, where an expansive boreal forest – one quarter of the world’s remaining undisturbed forest – is under threat. Operations that encroach into this ecosystem will not only harm bears, caribou and lynx but the First Nations communities, who are already suffering heightened incidences of cancer because of exposure to naphthenic acid, a constituent of petroleum that becomes concentrated in the hot water required to process tar sands.
Similarly, it is conceivable that Europe’s restrictions on genetically modified (GM) foods could be one of the first targets of aggrieved corporations once the EU-Canada deal comes into effect. Whereas the planting of GM crops can only be authorised in the EU after their probable ecological consequences have been assessed, the safeguards in Canada are considerably less robust. Last year SmartStax, a new corn designed by Monsanto and Dow Chemicals to resist a variety of different pesticides, was authorised in Canada without having to go through the health and environment checks required in Europe.
As its contribution to the trade talks, Monsanto’s Canadian subsidiary has advocated that the EU and Canada would recognise each other’s standards, rather than having to introduce anything more rigorous than those currently in place. This position has been endorsed by the Canada Europe Roundtable for Business, an influential lobby group in both Brussels and Ottawa.
The strategy being pursued by the captains of industry is all the more troubling, when one considers that they are sneakily trying to attain objectives that have been rejected by separate international fora. In a triumph for the so-called anti-globalisation movement, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was shelved in the late 1990s. Discussed at the level of the World Trade Organisation, that treaty was also designed to give corporations the power to counter green or social rules they regarded as pesky.
Recently, however, a letter signed by prominent writers and activists such as Naomi Klein, Susan George and José Bové (now a French MEP) dubbed the draft EU-Canada agreement a “carbon copy” of the MAI. Both contain the same “judicial monstrosity”, the letter noted.
Often the EU’s representatives seek to portray themselves as slightly more progressive than their north American peers by bragging of how they have set deeper targets for greenhouse gas reductions or of how they are committed to maintaining a “social market” economy. Yet in reality, they are just as ideologically blinkered as Stephen Harper and his right-wing government in Canada. It was the European side, for example, which insisted that public procurement markets at both federal and provincial levels in Canada should be opened up to European competitors. Although Canada’s 10 provincial governments were not party to the NAFTA talks, they are participating in the trade discussions with the EU.
In the past few weeks, the EU has complained about entirely reasonable efforts by the Montreal authorities to ensure that new trains for its subway were made in Quebec. If the EU’s arm-twisting pays off, it will be illegal for such tenders to contain “buy local” caveats in the future, while a range of other vital services – including healthcare and water – will be opened to competition. Michael Moore’s film “Sicko” indicated that politicians across the political spectrum in Canada regarded access to affordable healthcare as a basic right. That right would be harder to protect once the business of keeping people alive is handed over to the private insurance industry.
The EU-Canada talks should be viewed against the backdrop of the wider external trade policy being pursued by the European Commission. In 2006, Peter Mandelson, then the EU’s trade chief, published a strategy known as Global Europe. It committed the Union to attack relentlessly any obstacles encountered by corporations doing business abroad. Brussels officials have had no qualms about seeking counsel from some of the least ethical players in the marketplace. When the Commission held a conference in 2008 to evaluate the first two years of Global Europe, the vehicle-maker Caterpillar was invited to thunder against air pollution standards it felt should not apply to its products. None of the conference speakers saw fit to query if Caterpillar, provider of the specially designed bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes, was a suitable source of advice.
During November, a follow-up paper to Global Europe will be published by the current EU trade commissioner Karel de Gucht. It is expected that this will recommend sticking to the objectives set by Mandelson, though to enlarge the geographical focus of trade policy. With a free trade agreement with South Korea in the bag though encountering difficulties winning approval from the European Parliament) and one with India likely to be clinched next year, the European Commission is eyeing potential deals with China and Japan.
Heedless to regional variations within its negotiating “partners”, the EU has been striving to ram through a series of largely identical trade deals. At the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, it has been pressurising India into imposing patents on medicines in a way that would jeopardise its status as a leading manufacturer of generic drugs for the world’s poor. Some African governments, meanwhile, have accused the EU of trying to bully them into accepting liberalisation plans they regard as inimical to their economic development. And the Union has gone ahead and finalised a free trade agreement with Colombia, despite receiving voluminous evidence from human rights watchdogs documenting how the Bogota authorities have connived in numerous violent attacks on trade unionists.
Back in 1999, protesters fighting the ‘Battle of Seattle’ raised many awkward questions about how the rules of world commerce had been rigged to benefit the super-rich. Global trade talks have been at a standstill for most of the subsequent decade, yet that doesn’t mean the rigging has stopped. Rather, it is taking place in a greater number of venues, making resistance to it increasingly difficult, yet no less urgent.
·First published by openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net), 29 October 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Pentagon pulls Europe's strings
One little known fact about Brussels is that it a sliver of the city has a US address. American staff working in NATO headquarters can send letters to mom and pop or take deliveries from on-line retailers like Amazon, paying the same postage and shipping fees as they would within their home country. Under the “Air Post Office” zip code applying to this mail, the Belgian capital is considered part of New York City.
This may seem trivial but it is symptomatic of how the Pentagon regards most of Europe as its puppet. Worse again, senior officials working for our governments promote the subservience as desirable. “What is the point of the Belgian army today?” Robert Cooper, one of the EU’s top politico-military strategists and a former adviser to Tony Blair, has written. “It is not to defend Belgium, since no one is going to attack it. Rather, it is to demonstrate a sufficient commitment to the ‘West’ that friends and allies, above all the USA, will be there if ever Belgium should need help.”
During their summit last week, the EU’s presidents and prime ministers tasked foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton with drawing up a blueprint for developing closer ties between the Union and NATO. No doubt, Ashton will do her best to present the military alliance as a benevolent one, intent on preventing nascent conflicts from escalating. Gamblers could not expect high odds on terms such as “we wish to exploit the synergies between the two organisations” appearing in her blueprint.
Yet no amount of turgid phrasing can mask how NATO and the EU have already become deeply enmeshed. Officially, six of the EU’s 27 countries are not full members of NATO: Austria, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus. Stealthily, however, the entire Union is being drawn into the US-dominated alliance. Sweden and Finland both have troops serving under NATO in Afghanistan, eroding their pretence to be neutral. Cyprus is the only EU country to have so far remained outside NATO’s misnamed Partnership for Peace.
In the past, the “Partnership” has often proven to be a waiting room for NATO accession. There is one exception to this general trend: Russia. Despite joining the Partnership in 1994, Russia has seen its relations with NATO deteriorate over the past decade. A military doctrine approved by Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, in February identified NATO’s continuous expansion into eastern Europe as one of the “main external threats of war”.
Rather than trying to assuage the Kremlin, NATO is still provocatively stretching its tentacles into Russia’s immediate neighbourhood. Ukraine failed to have its bid to join the alliance accepted at the 2008 NATO summit, but has more recently been promised a compensation prize. Within the next five or six years, Ukraine is scheduled to be the first country outside the alliance admitted to its “response force”. This carries the real risk that Kiev will sign up for participation in a conflict that Moscow opposes.
Russia has every right to be concerned, too, by the content of the “strategic concept” that will be rubber-stamped when NATO leaders assemble in Lisbon in November. This policy document will be based on the findings of a recent report indicating that competition for oil and other energy sources will be an issue of critical importance for the alliance in the decades ahead.
Drafted under the guidance of former Shell chief executive Jeroen van der Veer, the report eerily echoes a warning contained in a Russian intelligence assessment from 2007. According to that assessment, a confrontation between Russia and other nations determined to exploit the Arctic’s resources is a distinct possibility. Russia has sounded a bellicose note itself lately; for the first time in 20 years, it has resumed air patrols in a region containing 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of undiscovered oil, if estimates by American geologists are accurate. Canada, one of several NATO members asserting a claim over the Arctic, has further ratcheted up the tension with Russia by conducting a series of “sovereignty exercises” in the Arctic.
It is no secret, of course, that the US has a seemingly insatiable lust for fossil fuels. Barack Obama may be trying to convince us that America is winding down its military operations in Iraq but major corporations have no intention of quitting the country’s oil-fields. The colonial conquest of Afghanistan, meanwhile, cannot be separated from a plan that the US has had since at least the 1990s to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan. In 2007, Richard Boucher, then the US assistant secretary of state, acknowledged that Washington hoped to source energy from a pipeline linking south and central Asia.
As if the spiralling costs of these wars were not high enough, the US – egged on by Israel – is preparing to attack Iran, home to about 10% of the world’s oil and gas reserves. A recent article by Michel Chossudovsky, economics professor with the University of Ottawa, contends that US wishes not only to control Iran’s energy supplies but also to challenge the influence of Russia and China in the Middle East. The reasons he cites appear far more credible than the official narrative from Washington about wishing to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.
By parroting American propaganda, its allies in NATO and the EU are trying to hoodwink the public into accepting another disastrous war.
•First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 19-25 September 2010
This may seem trivial but it is symptomatic of how the Pentagon regards most of Europe as its puppet. Worse again, senior officials working for our governments promote the subservience as desirable. “What is the point of the Belgian army today?” Robert Cooper, one of the EU’s top politico-military strategists and a former adviser to Tony Blair, has written. “It is not to defend Belgium, since no one is going to attack it. Rather, it is to demonstrate a sufficient commitment to the ‘West’ that friends and allies, above all the USA, will be there if ever Belgium should need help.”
During their summit last week, the EU’s presidents and prime ministers tasked foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton with drawing up a blueprint for developing closer ties between the Union and NATO. No doubt, Ashton will do her best to present the military alliance as a benevolent one, intent on preventing nascent conflicts from escalating. Gamblers could not expect high odds on terms such as “we wish to exploit the synergies between the two organisations” appearing in her blueprint.
Yet no amount of turgid phrasing can mask how NATO and the EU have already become deeply enmeshed. Officially, six of the EU’s 27 countries are not full members of NATO: Austria, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus. Stealthily, however, the entire Union is being drawn into the US-dominated alliance. Sweden and Finland both have troops serving under NATO in Afghanistan, eroding their pretence to be neutral. Cyprus is the only EU country to have so far remained outside NATO’s misnamed Partnership for Peace.
In the past, the “Partnership” has often proven to be a waiting room for NATO accession. There is one exception to this general trend: Russia. Despite joining the Partnership in 1994, Russia has seen its relations with NATO deteriorate over the past decade. A military doctrine approved by Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, in February identified NATO’s continuous expansion into eastern Europe as one of the “main external threats of war”.
Rather than trying to assuage the Kremlin, NATO is still provocatively stretching its tentacles into Russia’s immediate neighbourhood. Ukraine failed to have its bid to join the alliance accepted at the 2008 NATO summit, but has more recently been promised a compensation prize. Within the next five or six years, Ukraine is scheduled to be the first country outside the alliance admitted to its “response force”. This carries the real risk that Kiev will sign up for participation in a conflict that Moscow opposes.
Russia has every right to be concerned, too, by the content of the “strategic concept” that will be rubber-stamped when NATO leaders assemble in Lisbon in November. This policy document will be based on the findings of a recent report indicating that competition for oil and other energy sources will be an issue of critical importance for the alliance in the decades ahead.
Drafted under the guidance of former Shell chief executive Jeroen van der Veer, the report eerily echoes a warning contained in a Russian intelligence assessment from 2007. According to that assessment, a confrontation between Russia and other nations determined to exploit the Arctic’s resources is a distinct possibility. Russia has sounded a bellicose note itself lately; for the first time in 20 years, it has resumed air patrols in a region containing 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of undiscovered oil, if estimates by American geologists are accurate. Canada, one of several NATO members asserting a claim over the Arctic, has further ratcheted up the tension with Russia by conducting a series of “sovereignty exercises” in the Arctic.
It is no secret, of course, that the US has a seemingly insatiable lust for fossil fuels. Barack Obama may be trying to convince us that America is winding down its military operations in Iraq but major corporations have no intention of quitting the country’s oil-fields. The colonial conquest of Afghanistan, meanwhile, cannot be separated from a plan that the US has had since at least the 1990s to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan. In 2007, Richard Boucher, then the US assistant secretary of state, acknowledged that Washington hoped to source energy from a pipeline linking south and central Asia.
As if the spiralling costs of these wars were not high enough, the US – egged on by Israel – is preparing to attack Iran, home to about 10% of the world’s oil and gas reserves. A recent article by Michel Chossudovsky, economics professor with the University of Ottawa, contends that US wishes not only to control Iran’s energy supplies but also to challenge the influence of Russia and China in the Middle East. The reasons he cites appear far more credible than the official narrative from Washington about wishing to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.
By parroting American propaganda, its allies in NATO and the EU are trying to hoodwink the public into accepting another disastrous war.
•First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 19-25 September 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Canada bids to export pollution to Europe
Fears of a trade dispute with Canada have made European Union officials reluctant to categorise tar sands from North America as a more polluting fuel than conventional petrol.
Officials working for the EU’s executive, the European Commission, are considering the implementation of a fuel quality law nominally designed to make transport cleaner.
While the overall goal of the directive has been agreed - that oil companies bring down their emissions of climate changing greenhouse gases by 6 percent between this year and 2020 – its fineprint has yet to be hammered out. One of the trickiest issues to emerge in the discussions relates to whether imports of non-conventional sources of oil should be restricted.
In a 2009 paper drafted by environment officials tar sands were deemed to be 20 percent more damaging to the climate than the petrol typically used to power Europe’s cars. But this provision was removed from the draft after Ross Hornby, Canada’s ambassador in Brussels, wrote to Karl Falkenberg, head of the Commission’s environment department, in January.
Hornby’s letter was made available to green campaigners, under the EU’s freedom of information rules. In it, he objected to a proposal that fuels derived from tar sands would be treated differently to those using conventional crude oil. The reporting requirements that this would place on energy firms would be too onerous and would constitute a “barrier” to trade, he warned.
Tar sands – a mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – lying under the Canadian province of Alberta constitute the world’s second largest proven reserves of oil, outside Saudi Arabia. A study titled “Energy Revolution” published earlier this month by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council estimated that producing oil from tar sands would release over four times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than standard oil drilling does today.
A senior Brussels official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the question of how tar sands should be categorised in the EU “goes further than the quality of oil, it is also a trade question”. The official added that “you can be sure” the matter will be discussed in the context of a nominally separate free trade agreement that the EU and Canada have aimed to conclude by the end of next year.
Stuart Trew from the Council of Canadians, a social justice organisation, said a moratorium on the extraction of tar sands is necessary. The eagerness of the Ottawa government to exploit the reserves under Alberta is “a blight on Canada’s reputation and on the world,” he said.
Trew expressed particular concern about how a draft version of the trade agreement would – if implemented in its current form - allow corporations to take action against measures that they perceive as hostile to trade. A similar provision in the North America Free Trade Agreement has enabled companies to attack health and environmental measures in the U.S. and Mexico, he added, noting that the procedure lets corporations bypass courts and instead set up private panels.
“Any attempt to cut back on the production of tar sands, to make stronger environmental rules or to limit the amount of water used to make tar sands could result in a challenge,” he said. Three to five barrels of water are required for every barrel of oil produced from tar sands.
Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s commissioner for “climate action”, wrote to several green groups on July 13, promising that a proposal for regulating tar sands would be put forward after her summer break (most Brussels institutions close during August).
A spokeswoman for Hedegaard said that the Commission is “carefully analysing the different options available and will come up with a balanced proposal, including solid reporting requirements necessary for demonstrating compliance with the target.”
Shell, one of the largest investors in the Alberta tar sands industry, has been vigorously lobbying against tough EU fuel quality rules. In May, it hosted a dinner for members of the European Parliament in an attempt to convince them that tar sands extraction should not be vilified.
Ecologists are adamant that a specific “default value” should be set for tar sands, stating that their production must respect EU moves to reduce the environmental impact of transport fuel. Without such a value, tar sands would be treated the same as conventional petrol.
Nusa Urbancic from the organisation Transport and the Environment said that numerous scientific studies have indicated that tar sands must be regarded as dirtier than conventional fossil fuels. The results of the EU’s discussions will have implications that stretch beyond the Union’s borders, she added.
“The European Commission has a duty to protect the environment, not to protect Canada’s (commercial) interests,” she said. “Europe is a standard-setter when it comes to fuels, vehicles, electronic machinery and things like that. The Canadians fear that if the Europe puts in a value for tar sands, other countries will follow. This is clearly a political decision. If we want to prevent climate change, we should be leaving this stuff underground.”
•Originally published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 19 July 2010
Officials working for the EU’s executive, the European Commission, are considering the implementation of a fuel quality law nominally designed to make transport cleaner.
While the overall goal of the directive has been agreed - that oil companies bring down their emissions of climate changing greenhouse gases by 6 percent between this year and 2020 – its fineprint has yet to be hammered out. One of the trickiest issues to emerge in the discussions relates to whether imports of non-conventional sources of oil should be restricted.
In a 2009 paper drafted by environment officials tar sands were deemed to be 20 percent more damaging to the climate than the petrol typically used to power Europe’s cars. But this provision was removed from the draft after Ross Hornby, Canada’s ambassador in Brussels, wrote to Karl Falkenberg, head of the Commission’s environment department, in January.
Hornby’s letter was made available to green campaigners, under the EU’s freedom of information rules. In it, he objected to a proposal that fuels derived from tar sands would be treated differently to those using conventional crude oil. The reporting requirements that this would place on energy firms would be too onerous and would constitute a “barrier” to trade, he warned.
Tar sands – a mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – lying under the Canadian province of Alberta constitute the world’s second largest proven reserves of oil, outside Saudi Arabia. A study titled “Energy Revolution” published earlier this month by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council estimated that producing oil from tar sands would release over four times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than standard oil drilling does today.
A senior Brussels official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the question of how tar sands should be categorised in the EU “goes further than the quality of oil, it is also a trade question”. The official added that “you can be sure” the matter will be discussed in the context of a nominally separate free trade agreement that the EU and Canada have aimed to conclude by the end of next year.
Stuart Trew from the Council of Canadians, a social justice organisation, said a moratorium on the extraction of tar sands is necessary. The eagerness of the Ottawa government to exploit the reserves under Alberta is “a blight on Canada’s reputation and on the world,” he said.
Trew expressed particular concern about how a draft version of the trade agreement would – if implemented in its current form - allow corporations to take action against measures that they perceive as hostile to trade. A similar provision in the North America Free Trade Agreement has enabled companies to attack health and environmental measures in the U.S. and Mexico, he added, noting that the procedure lets corporations bypass courts and instead set up private panels.
“Any attempt to cut back on the production of tar sands, to make stronger environmental rules or to limit the amount of water used to make tar sands could result in a challenge,” he said. Three to five barrels of water are required for every barrel of oil produced from tar sands.
Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s commissioner for “climate action”, wrote to several green groups on July 13, promising that a proposal for regulating tar sands would be put forward after her summer break (most Brussels institutions close during August).
A spokeswoman for Hedegaard said that the Commission is “carefully analysing the different options available and will come up with a balanced proposal, including solid reporting requirements necessary for demonstrating compliance with the target.”
Shell, one of the largest investors in the Alberta tar sands industry, has been vigorously lobbying against tough EU fuel quality rules. In May, it hosted a dinner for members of the European Parliament in an attempt to convince them that tar sands extraction should not be vilified.
Ecologists are adamant that a specific “default value” should be set for tar sands, stating that their production must respect EU moves to reduce the environmental impact of transport fuel. Without such a value, tar sands would be treated the same as conventional petrol.
Nusa Urbancic from the organisation Transport and the Environment said that numerous scientific studies have indicated that tar sands must be regarded as dirtier than conventional fossil fuels. The results of the EU’s discussions will have implications that stretch beyond the Union’s borders, she added.
“The European Commission has a duty to protect the environment, not to protect Canada’s (commercial) interests,” she said. “Europe is a standard-setter when it comes to fuels, vehicles, electronic machinery and things like that. The Canadians fear that if the Europe puts in a value for tar sands, other countries will follow. This is clearly a political decision. If we want to prevent climate change, we should be leaving this stuff underground.”
•Originally published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 19 July 2010
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