Printer-friendly versionSend by emailPDF version

"We the undersigned call on the Group of 8 (G8) leaders to recognize and act upon the twin, interlinked crises of debt and global warming. Current G8 energy investments are fundamentally at odds with sound development practice. Ongoing public financing of the fossil fuel industry is increasing debt, poverty, and climate change. Urgent action is now required to substantially reduce emissions, reduce fossil fuel dependence, and protect people around the world, especially the vulnerable, the poor and disappearing nations."

Civil Society Statement on Debt and Climate Change

We the undersigned call on the Group of 8 (G8) leaders to
recognize and act upon the twin, interlinked crises of
debt and global warming. Current G8 energy investments are
fundamentally at odds with sound development practice.
Ongoing public financing of the fossil fuel industry is
increasing debt, poverty, and climate change. Urgent
action is now required to substantially reduce emissions,
reduce fossil fuel dependence, and protect people around
the world, especially the vulnerable, the poor and
disappearing nations.

Such urgent action requires that G8 nations make rapid,
specific, substantial and sustained cuts in their domestic
emissions of greenhouse gases. It also requires that G8
leaders cut the significant emissions that are resulting
from their taxpayer-financed multilateral and bilateral
lending agencies.

Export credit agencies and international financial
institutions are leading financiers of oil, gas and coal
projects around the world. The World Bank Group alone has
financed over $25 billion in oil, gas and coal contracts
(including fossil fuel-fired power plants) since the UN
Climate Convention was signed by a majority of the world?s
countries in 1992. The current and future emissions from
all World Bank fossil fuel projects financed since 1992 is
equivalent to almost two years' worth of global greenhouse
gas emissions.

While the World Bank is supposed to serve the world's
poor, it is the poor who are likely to suffer first and
foremost from climate change, as they will not be able to
take preventive measures to protect themselves. In
addition, over 80% of all oil projects financed by the
World Bank are designed to produce petroleum for export to
the wealthy countries of the north. Along with most of the
gas and coal projects financed by the World Bank, they do
little or nothing to meet the growing energy needs of the
poorest. Public financing, intended for poverty
alleviation and
sustainable development, instead ends up being simply
another public subsidy to wealthy governments, consumers
and corporations.

Other multilateral development banks and publicly financed
export credit agencies (ECAs) follow a similar pattern of
investment. U.S. export credit and investment insurance
agencies alone have invested over $32 billion in financing
and insurance for oil and gas fields, pipelines and
coal-fired power plants since 1992 without assessing their
contribution to global warming nor their impact on the
U.S. or global environment.

Estimates suggest these U.S. taxpayer-backed ECA
investments alone are releasing and will release over one
year's worth of global greenhouse gas emissions. Other
ECAs have supported fossil fuel-based energy projects
which produce or will produce as much as 20 times the
amount of greenhouse gases as their own governments have
committed to reduce under the Kyoto Protocol.

Meanwhile, the World Bank and the Global Environmental
Facility, created at the 1992 Earth Summit to act on
climate change, combined have invested over 17 times more
in fossil fuels and fossil fuel-driven power plants as
they have in renewable forms of energy and energy
efficiency projects. Carbon trading engineered by the
World Bank Group in advance of the Clean Development
Mechanism is resulting in few, if any, truly renewable
energy projects. Instead, monoculture tree plantations,
gas flare reduction and methane capture from waste dumps
are gaining the lions' share of financing-while carbon
credits as currently enacted enable dirty industry to
continue with business as usual in the
North.

Gas flaring and venting by petroleum corporations in
Nigeria remains sub-Saharan Africa's largest source of
greenhouse gases, yet, the World Bank is preparing to sell
carbon credits for Chevron/Shell's West-African Gas
pipeline, despite the fact that overall greenhouse gas
emissions due
to flaring will not be reduced by this project. Such
initiatives are misleading and provide no net progress
toward climate stability and a net loss for local as well
as global communities.

Thus, the public institutions entrusted with averting a
climate catastrophe are dangerously exacerbating the
problem. Such institutional corruption results in paltry
funding for renewable energy, a growing energy deficit
among the poorest in developing countries, and increased
developing country debt.

The World Bank's own Extractive Industries Review, a
three-year study commissioned by the World Bank?s
president with involvement of government, industry and
civil society, came to the conclusion that, if the World
Bank is serious about poverty alleviation and climate
change, it should get out of coal immediately, get out of
oil by 2008, and rapidly scale up its investments in
renewable energy at the rate of 20% a year. Yet senior
World Bank officials openly reject the report's
recommendations.

Thus, we call on the G8 nations to:

1) Halt the Northern financing of Southern coal-fired
power
projects immediately;

2) End aid financing for oil. OECD countries should end
Northern governmental subsidies for new oil projects in
the South. Such projects have not historically provided
energy for the poor, and are proven to be associated with
a rise in poverty, public health problems, local
environmental destruction, conflict, corruption and debt,
and to increase
the risk to the poorest from climate change. Thus, they
cannot be considered as "aid" for the poor;

3) Set up an international sustainable renewable energy
fund, independent of the development banks and export
credit agencies, with funding provided by the G8, that
would set as a target the delivery of small-scale,
community-based, sustainable, equitable and appropriate
energy services and technologies, excluding large dams and
nuclear power,
to the more than 2 billion poorest living in developing
countries, low-income areas of developed countries, and
countries with economies in transition within the next 20
years;

4) Work with developing countries, especially small island
states and Arctic regional local authorities, to build
technological and infrastructure capacity to assist them
in developing solutions to mitigate and adapt to the
adverse effects of climate change;

5) Immediately cancel 100% of the remaining multilateral
and
bilateral debt without requiring that debtor countries
join the HIPC(Heavily Indebted Poor Country) initiative as
a precondition for debt cancellation, nor accept any
additional harmful economic conditions;

6) Concentrate development aid to oil-exporting countries
on
helping them diversify their economies in order to
minimize debt burdens from excessive oil-export dependence
and maximize income generation for the population;

7) Commit by the next G8 Summit in 2006 to a global
harmonization of energy and development strategies in
light of global warming, debt, poverty, and the finite
quantity of fossil fuels remaining in the ground and the
limited ability of our atmosphere to safely absorb
additional greenhouse gas emissions. These issues should
henceforth be viewed as inextricably woven together.

Signed,

Please forward this letter widely and return all sign-ons
(organizational sign-ons with names of directors or senior
staff preferred, though individuals are welcome to sign on
as well) to [email protected] as soon as possible. We will
be delivering this with your names at a press conference
at the G8 Summit next week in Scotland.

Sustainable Energy & Economy Network