Our Italian Counter Balance friends and colleagues CRBM are blogging as well.
The pic shows not some modern-day cannon, but pipes waiting to go into the ground on a 150 kilometre pipeline from the “Monti Alpi” oil storage plant to the coastal city of Taranto, in the southern Apennine mountains of the Val d’Agri area in southern Italy - part of oil projects that received over half a billion euros in loans from the EIB between 1996 and 2000.
In spite of the vast sums involved, and other than some of the fairly radical “get the vote out” spots, the US presidential race has brought little in the way of innovative TV advertising. One issue for pro-Republicans to try to get innovative on is the ultra-sensitive race issue, as this ad from last week attempts to do.
You can see what they’re trying to do, and aside from the unsavoury undertones (dragging MLK into the mire too) it falls down on account of sheer lack of content. But on an emotional level, it may resonate with white guys apprehensive about denying a black guy their vote because it could make them look like racists. The elements are there: a black guy reinforcing himself by invoking Martin Luther King - you just need a slither of savvy to know what’s going on.
The “climate change” tick-box elements are certainly present in this EIB advert that appeared in Environmental Finance magazine in May. But something appears to have gone badly wrong…
Before I go on, I should point out that as far as I’m aware this is not a spoof. The text in the grey box (bloody scanner) reads: We finance climate change and clean energy projects in support of environmentally and socially sustainable development throughout the world.
What on earth is that penguin doing there though, basking in the sun, on a detached piece of icecap? It seems to be getting much needed ventilation from the turbines. Did someone at the agency fall for Terry Jones’ penguin April Fool last year?
At least it’s honest: since the adoption of the Kyoto protocol in 1997 the EIB has pumped over 17 billion euros into fossil fuel projects both inside and outside the EU. In 2007 alone it loaned over 3 billion euros for fossil fuels. The EIB needs to get out of fossils, for the sake of penguins and us all.
With comments such as “very vague” and stressing the need for “greater detail” in how the EIB will exercise its “discretion to apply EU standards or social standards, or not” (emphasis added), the International Finance Corporation (the World Bank’s private lending arm) has provided its input to the EIB’s public consultation on its currently draft Environmental and Social Statement.
The IFC’s comments are not long, they are brutally concise. They succeed in unravelling some reasonably aspirational proposals on social protection that the EIB is attempting to finesse, unfortunately, with its trademark discretionary language. As IFC notes:
“The effect of these things might mean that you simply would not apply social standards in a majority of your projects outside EU, potentially because you do not ordinarily require the discipline of due diligence on social issues within EU, and hence your internal capacity simply dictates what is possible or not in the emerging markets (but mostly not possible).”
Ouch. A revised draft of the statement, featuring hopefully some fundamentally revised thinking and language, is due soon. A range of inputs to the first draft is available on the EIB website, but oddly lacking are contributions from business. Are we to believe that the EIB’s principal beneficiaries had nowt to say on the new statement, a statement which:
Commercial confidentiality surely has no application in the shaping of shared environmental objectives.
According to an EIB press release in 2001, the 4.2 billion dollar Chad-Cameroon pipeline project was all about securing “a real breakthrough for Chad, one of the least developed countries in the world.”
Judge for yourself the merits of that prediction with today’s news that the World Bank has pulled out of the project citing the Chadian government’s failure to honour an agreement to use some oil revenues for poverty reduction.
The EIB has provided the project with 144 million euro financing, and its intentions remain unclear. Having “aligned” itself with the World Bank when Paul Wolfowitz oversaw the bank’s pioneering initiative in Chad disastrously and predictably unravel in early 2006, the EIB suspended co-operation on any new public sector projects in Chad. But expect the EIB to keep its head down here: it will be busy considering whether the project’s “social and environmental concerns have been met” (in the language of a European Parliament resolution from 2000 – strange language at that, you almost know what they mean). As Korinna Horta of Environmental Defense Fund writes of the project, however, in Counter Balance’s Citizens’ Guide to the European Investment Bank:
“It has fuelled violence, impoverished people in the oil fields, and along the pipeline route it has exacerbated pressures on indigenous peoples and created new environmental problems. At the same time, with about 118 million barrels of oil produced by September 30, 2005, ExxonMobil, the leader of the oil consortium and the world’s largest oil company, has registered record profits.”
Well over half of the EIB’s lending for the project went to the oil consortium.
More EIB involvement in dirty energy projects in Africa looks likely following the announcement this week of a one billion dollar EU aid package to expand Africa’s energy sector. Oil and gas pipelines between African countries feature heavily (along with “transparency”) in this Africa-EU partnership, as does the Europe-bound nine billion euro Trans-Sahara Gas Pipeline. Exactly what the bank “promoting EU climate change and energy objectives” is being lined up for in all of this will be something to watch.
