News

Wilmar International and European banks and pension funds fuel landgrabs in Uganda

Jeff Conant — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:04:09 -0400

Palm oil giant Wilmar International linked to community displacement and deforestation

European banks and pension funds continue to finance one of the largest and most destructive palm oil giants, Wilmar International, according to new research released today by Friends of the Earth Europe. Well known European banks including HSBC, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Rabobank offer financial assistance to Wilmar valuing over one billion euro, and European and American financial institutions own shares in the company worth $799 million.

Wilmar International owns oil palm plantation and refiners in Indonesia and Malaysia. In 2011 and 2012, Newsweek ranked Wilmar as the world’s worst company in terms of environmental performance. New research from Friends of the Earth Europe links Wilmar’s subsidiaries on Kalangala Island, Uganda to land-grabs and violations of both national laws and environmental legislation.

The project has led to the deforestation of around 3,600 hectares in Kalangala and displaced farmers and their families with no compensation or alternative livelihood options, robbing a large number of islanders of their food, medicine, and livelihood. Wilmar's subsidiaries are accused of violating the National Environmental Act (1988), the Ugandan constitution (1995), the Land Acquisition Act (1965) and the Land Act (1998).

Palm oil is second only to rapeseed as a biofuel feedstock in Europe, which has put growing pressure on land, food and forests. European countries have set targets and subsidies for agrofuels (as biofuels are known in many countries), to meet EU renewable energy goals, but these targets have driven the expansion of plantations overseas. Legislation on agrofuels is currently being debated in the European Parliament and Council: Friends of the Earth Europe is urging the EU to cap and then reduce to zero such fuels, as well as introduce full carbon accounting to prevent high carbon fuels like palm oil biodiesel from being sold in Europe.

Anne van Schaik, accountable finance campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe said: “Investors need to push Wilmar to clean up its act, or put their money elsewhere. Wilmar and its subsidiaries, backed by European money, are forcing communities from their land in Uganda.”

The majority of investors and financiers have sustainability principles guiding investments, with some requiring companies to uphold international standards – the UN Global Compact Principles, OECD Guidelines and Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). However, investors are failing to act despite clear violations by Wilmar of these criteria, according to Friends of the Earth Europe.

Anne van Schaik continued: “Financial institutions have sustainability principles, but don’t act despite clear violations by Wilmar. These violations are not new – Wilmar has been involved in land rights conflicts and the violation of environmental standards for many years. Investors and financiers need to put their money where their mouth is.”

Friends of the Earth Europe is calling on investors and financiers of Wilmar to pressure the company to clean up its operations, or risk divestment. European banks and pension funds should not be contributing to land conflicts with local communities, deforestation or to companies who violate national law. Wilmar should bring an immediate end to land-grabbing, ensure adequate compensation, and any future development should obey national law and ensure free, prior and informed consent from affected communities.

California REDD: A False Solution

Jeff Conant — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:08:40 -0400

Friends of the Earth is deeply devoted to curbing both deforestation and averting catastrophic climate change. Yet FoE’s international forests campaign has been actively engaged in opposing California’s pending adoption of a program known as REDD – Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Indeed, we’ve taken the lead, along with Greenpeace, California Environmental Justice Alliance, and two dozen other groups in asking the governor of California and the California Air Resources Board to reject REDD, and have just published an Op-Ed in the Sacramento Bee asking Californians to oppose the agreement.

So, if we care so much about forests and the climate, what gives?

Among environmental advocates, and especially forest defenders, REDD can be a complicated and divisive issue; among those a little beyond the inner circles of environmental advocacy, it’s downright baffling. FoE’s position is explained in our issue briefs here and here, and in past news releases (here and here), as well as in this cheeky breakdown of Ten Ways to Game the Carbon Market. Our position is also supported by a number of letters sent to California policymakers recently from Chiapas, Mexico, (“REDD will legally allow the continuation of the predatory and consumerist model”), from Acre, Brazil (“REDD represents the ‘theft’ of yet another ‘raw material’ from the territories of the peoples of the South: the ‘carbon reserves’ in their forests”), from the Corner House in the UK (“the toxic legacy of REDD would engrave the name Jerry Brown permanently in the ‘enemies of the environment roster’”), and from our sister groups in Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean (“REDD shifts responsibility for the climate crisis to the countries of the South, which do not have historical responsibility for the crisis”).

These letters are strongly worded, indicating the fierce stance that many opposing groups take to the issue. Given that proponents of REDD strongly believe that California's proposal is a win-win, I’d like to shine a little more light on our position.

REDD, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, proposes to put a price on standing forests in order to incentivize conserving them. This leads many enviros to think it’s a conservation effort. But it’s not. It’s a carbon offset scheme, and a dubious one at that. Reducing emissions from deforestation is crucial, both for climate change mitigation and simply because we need to preserve our remaining forests – but expecting carbon markets to do the job can, and does, lead to very problematic outcomes.

For years economists have promoted carbon trading as the cheapest way to cut carbon pollution – though this notion took a major body blow recently when The Economist (among many others) declared the EU emissions trading scheme both ineffective, and, to put it plainly, dead. Swiss banking giant UBS reported that the EU scheme had cost the continent's consumers $287 billion for "almost zero impact" on cutting carbon emissions. These massive failings led Carbon Trade Watch and 120 other groups to note that “The use of offset projects has resulted in an increase of emissions worldwide… and has brought severe social and environmental consequences to communities where the offset projects are implemented, together with communities living next to the industrial facilities that buy the credits” and to call on Europe to scrap the European Emissions Trading System.

And this is the morass that California is wading into. While even some of our favorite media sources buy the state’s line that California can succeed where others have failed, we believe such wishful thinking is pure hubris. With even Time Magazine seeing the carbon bubble about to burst, it seems necessary to repeat what social movements and groups like Climate Justice Now! have known for years: that drastic reductions in emissions from fossil fuel use are the only way to avert the climate crisis. Indeed, Oilwatch International sent California policymakers a statement with a pretty clear message to that effect: “Don’t let Shell roast the planet.”

What these concerns point to is that emissions trading simply subsidizes the fossil fuel industry. Interestingly, many groups deeply invested in REDD are also deeply invested in fossil fuels -- a point that should give serious pause.

But enough about fossil fuels—have I mentioned forests yet? If not, it’s because forests are secondary to REDD (it’s a carbon offset scheme), and secondary to California’s plan.

Proponents of REDD as a mechanism for saving forests assert that by putting a price on the carbon stored in trees, existing economic incentives to deforest could be reversed. However, numerous studies show that failure to address the true drivers of deforestation – high demand for wood products, expansion of industrial agriculture, illegal and unplanned forest conversion, conflicts over land and resources, and extractive activities – will generally undermine any effort to ‘protect’ forests through “payment for ecosystem services” schemes such as REDD. In other words, expecting carbon markets to do the job of protecting forests can, and does, lead to very problematic outcomes.

Some of these outcomes are described by Tracey Osbourne of the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, and other academics at the Public Political Ecology Lab. Osbourne, who has put in years studying carbon forestry in a Mayan community in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas, finds that “when the carbon market enters forest ecosystems, it targets land uses of low market value, which in many developing countries is derived from subsistence needs.” “In an early program that intended to lay the groundwork for REDD+ in Chiapas,” she writes, “subsistence activities were constrained while production of African oil palm and jatropha for biofuels received subsides from the state.”

In other words, Osbourne’s findings show that carbon forestry requires that farmers give up producing food for themselves in exchange for ‘capturing carbon’. Proponents of a market-based logic tend to see this as “providing economic opportunity.” But proponents of indigenous rights and cultural integrity tend to see it as causing cultural erosion, with the attendant negative impacts to the ecologies that have been cared for by local cultures forever, precisely through their subsistence activities.

Kathy MacAfee, Associate Professor of International Relations at SF State, argues that“Ecosystem services have become the latest in a long history of tropical-commodity miracle crops” that “are no more likely to boost prosperity for the majority in the exporting regions than did coffee, sugar, rubber, or any such commodities in the past.”

In other words, just as in coffee, sugar, rubber, and other commodity markets, the middle-men involved in REDD and carbon trading will likely capture the greatest part of the profit, while the producers go hungry.

MacAfee’s conclusions match those of the Munden Project, a comprehensive assessment of REDD+ conducted by experts in derivatives trading, which points out, “Experience with numerous commodities markets shows a generalized pattern whereby commodity producers receive an extremely limited percentage of the final commodity cost.”

It is not only concern for misplaced project benefits that worries community-based organizations in Chiapas – it is concern that REDD will continue to exacerbate land conflicts and lead to ongoing evictions in the densely forested and hotly contested Lacandon jungle. (I’ve documented these concerns extensively here, here, and here and we’ve posted current documentation about the evictions in Chiapas here.)

And this is where the rubber tree hits the tarmac. Many REDD and PES schemes, including early efforts in Chiapas and Acre, the states where California hopes to draw its REDD offset credits from, have either caused or exacerbated social conflicts. This is what we meant when, in our open letter to the Governor and California Air Resources Board, we stated that “Based on the experiences of existing REDD mechanisms and processes, we strongly believe that subnational REDD initiatives financed primarily or wholly through offsets will be inefficient, ineffective, and will lead to perverse outcomes.”

One such perverse outcome, from the early effort to promote a REDD-type project in Chiapas was noted in a press release put out by FoE last October, where Rosario Aguilar, a health promoter from Chiapas, said, “Even before California has established its market, the REDD project being implemented in our communities is causing conflict and displacement. As part of their plan to move indigenous people off the land, the government cut off medical services to the village of Amador Hernández in the Lacandon Jungle. This is why we say that REDD is promoting death, not life.”

The hope for California REDD is that it will set a high bar for social and environmental safeguards, and by submitting subnational efforts to the light of international scrutiny, will prevent any further abuses of this sort. According to the recommendations of the REDD Offsets Working Group, no state could trade emissions offsets with California unless they have strict statewide deforestation baselines and targets, ensure local communities' lives are improved, respect indigenous peoples' rights, and meet or exceed the environmental standards of California. That certainly sounds good, but the question is how it can be carried out in practice, especially in states with long histories of conflict and depredation.

Intelligent people can have different positions on REDD, as the saying goes, and support for a program such as the one proposed by California is certainly understandable among those who, justifiably, want to see money for forest protection and low-carbon development. But even in Acre, Brazil—the state touted as having the most advanced ecosystem services law in the world—a number of groups have expressed concerns about the very nature of the proposal. An open letter from groups in Acre to the state of California calls REDD “a proposal based on a limited view of the forest, aimed at benefiting business interests and a small group linked to the government, while deepening already existing environmental and social injustice.”

A central concern expressed by the critical groups in Brazil is that REDD “is not an idea that emerged from an indigenous village or forest community in Acre." They go on to point out that:

"It emerged at the international level, through the combination of, among others: (1) the conservationist interests of big environmental NGOs in the North, (2) the interests of national and sub-national governments in the North seeking low-cost alternatives to supposedly ‘offset’ their continued and excessive emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases, (3) the interests of national and sub-national governments in the South seeking to obtain financial resources for the ‘protection’ of forests in their countries, (4) the interests of corporations that could profit from market-tradable ‘offset’ credits, including through speculation on secondary (derivatives) markets, which would allow them to continue destroying the forests for the extraction of timber, minerals or oil, the establishment of monoculture plantations, etc., thus expanding their business opportunities, and (5) the interests of consultants and other actors involved in financial capital markets who want to turn ‘unexploited’ forests into a new market for this type of capital, through the commercialization of ‘environmental services’ such as carbon sequestration, among others.”

A few years ago when cap-and-trade was in Congress, a lot of environmentalists wondered why FoE opposed it. In short, it was because, unless it's fundamentally rebuilt to maximize the cap and minimize the trade, cap-and-trade is a false solution to the climate crisis, and a bad deal for the planet. (Climate scientist James Hansen called it “the path focused on corporate greed.”) Now, in California, where cap-and-trade is already on the books, another false solution is on the table. In case anyone’s wondering why we oppose REDD in California – it’s the same story: unless it can be fundamentally reformed to favor the forests by first and foremost protecting those who live in them, it’s a false solution, and a bad deal for the planet.

BP greenwashes as climate dangers grow

Adam Russell — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:25:16 -0400

BP's careful control of image hides a record that should be alarming

With spring fully sprung and another Earth Day past, it is critical the public stay alert to corporations that wrap themselves in a green patina while acting to the contrary. King among the “green-washers” is British Petroleum, BP -- going as far as to assert to having gone “Beyond Petroleum.”

In future years -- on future Earth Days -- BP should forever be associated with this nation’s largest oil spill, caused by the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. While the Deepwater Horizon blew up on April 20 three years ago, it was not until two days -- Earth Day -- later that a five-mile slick was reported. That was attributed only to the 700,000 gallons of fuel carried on the rig at the time. It wasn’t until April 25 that a gusher over a mile subsurface was revealed.

Spill rate estimates grew from 40,000 gallons per hour to 200,000 gallons as data became available to conduct independent estimates. It took three months to “kill” the well, but not before more than 210 million gallons were “spilled” and numerous fish and wildlife were killed, along with the 11 crew members that died. BP added an additional 2 million gallons of dispersants at depth and on surface in an unprecedented ecological experiment to minimize surface manifestations.

Unlike the numerous iconic images of the Exxon Valdez spill that has remained in the public eye and consciousness for the past 24 years, BP masterfully controlled broadcast and Internet coverage of the Deepwater disaster, downplaying the impacts while restricting the ability of reporters to provide independent documentation. As a result of this and domination of the electronic and print media, the legal hearings to determine the degree of BP’s culpability in the Gulf of Mexico debacle concluded last month in Louisiana with little notice.

BP has spent millions attempting to counterfeit green credentials, while we sweat it out during this perilous time in the earth’s history. Whether it intentionally withheld flow rate information in the early days of the explosion -- just one of the many issues BP is being tried for in an apparent attempt to reduce its liability -- or not, its actions serve as a teachable moment for a world where carbon dioxide levels have just reached a critical point. BP should come to epitomize the term “green washing” in order to prevent its singular moment in our nation’s fossil fuel dependency from succumbing to a corporate barrage of bluster and slipping silently beneath the waves of public awareness.

While the world worries about carbon levels, BP recently announced a halt to its solar program, the very program behind the change to its current sun-inspired corporate logo. BP is now heavily invested in the highest carbon content tar sand-derived oil, for which it pays nothing into state or federal response accounts because the federal government does not consider it to be “oil.” Washington State does not tax oil entering the state by pipeline or rail, despite the risks posed.

By overlaying a self-righteous, green façade on the British company's aggressive corporate acquisitions in the United States, BP’s “Astroturf” campaign effectively deflected attention and regulatory scrutiny at a critical time in its expansion. Not to mention the short-term profit-taking the mergers afforded.

During this time, BP was on probation not only for serious accidents it had in Texas and Alaska, but for manipulation of the propane market. This manipulation was documented by Jeanne Pascal, the former EPA Region X officer assigned to BP in Seattle in ProPublica reporter Abraham Lustgarten’s excellent book, Run to Failure. Pascal's views need to be heard during this critical time. At least, we must find out what happened to the file she was about to present regarding EPA’s debarment of BP from federal contracts before her abrupt retirement. Since retiring, she has been quoted expressing dismay as to how the Department of Defense had interfered with her investigations.

The public needs to distinguish between corporations walking the walk vs. talking the talk. This is especially true now as we hear promises from the proponents of an unprecedented cavalcade of coal, tar sand and shale oil export proposals through Northwest rails and waterways. Not since the late 1970s, when Washington refineries switched from crude supplied by pipeline from Alberta to tankers from Alaska, has there been a bigger risk increase of a major oil spill besmirching our region.

While we have heard many government officials and industry representatives praise BP’s willingness to spend enormous sums of money in response to the Gulf gusher, BP has a long reputation of being pound-foolish when it comes to preventative maintenance. This tendency is documented in "Run to Failure." What may be lost on those willing to praise BP's cleanup efforts is the fact that the company has so much to lose as the nation’s largest offshore oil leaseholder and provider of defense fuels. (There still is some question as to how much its insurance will cover what it will be able to deduct from its taxes).

“Despite BP’s slick ad campaigns, the Gulf is still hurting and can’t wait any longer for restoration,” Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network, recently told Grist. She reminded us that two years ago BP promised to spend $1 billion on early restoration, to be used in two years. To date, BP has spent a mere 7 percent of the promised total. "It’s time BP be held fully accountable under the law,” she said.

It is equally important that the United States stop giving the company taxpayer dollars as long as BP continues to use them irresponsibly. Since much of the evidence of the spill’s impacts are tied up in litigation and the impacts on the lower food chain will not be immediately apparent, an adequate fund should be created to monitor the toxological impacts and habitat restoration efforts for at least a decade. At the same time, it is critical that the Obama Administration phase BP off the government dole and diversify with less recidivist energy providers, to operate reliably on our public lands and through our waters and could be depended on for defense fuels.

Regardless of who provides our nation with these filthy fuels, they will spill havoc on our waters and wreck our climate if we continue to subsidize their combustion. Time to tax carbon and sing, “Here Comes the Sun” in the manner of Richie Havens, who ironically died on Earth Day: Like we mean it. And unlike BP's supposed commitment to solar and other forms of clean energy.

This post was originally posted on Crosscut.com on May 12, 2013.

Photo credit: U.S. Coast Guard, Wikimedia Commons via Creative Commons

California cap-and-trade scheme could endanger rainforest peoples

Adam Russell — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:16:33 -0400

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Under California’s new cap-and-trade program, the state is considering allowing a controversial form of carbon credits that have been rejected by the European Union as ineffective and potentially harmful to rainforests in developing countries. Now an international coalition of environmental groups including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Sierra Club California is urging Gov. Jerry Brown to reject the so-called REDD credits, which could endanger the lives and livelihoods of indigenous forest peoples.

Since California signed a memorandum of understanding in 2010 with Chiapas, Mexico and Acre, Brazil, the state Air Resources Board has been working to forge an agreement to allow California industries, under the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), to offset their pollution by purchasing Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation credits that supposedly promote rainforest conservation in those areas.

A consulting group to the ARB recently released recommendations for the program and is accepting public comments through May 7. The environmental groups’ letter to Gov. Brown and the ARB -- on the heels of letters of protests from Indigenous groups in Acre and Chiapas -- points out deep flaws with the proposal:

[The] proposal is not only unlikely to deliver real, additional and permanent emission reductions, but it would also prevent Californians from getting the benefits of AB 32 at home. By allowing enterprises to buy international forest offsets, the amount of industrial emissions within the state would be greater than otherwise allowed by law, exposing people here in California to greater health and environmental risks, and preventing progressive Californian companies from benefitting from new technologies and innovations.

“REDD looks like a forest protection program,” said Jeff Conant, international forests campaigner with Friends of the Earth U.S., “but it’s not. It’s a carbon offset scheme. It fails to address the real causes of both deforestation and the climate crisis.”

“We need to reduce both deforestation and industrial emissions,” said Roman Czebiniak, senior climate and forest policy analyst at Greenpeace International. “Allowing major industries to merely replace one with the other not only puts the climate at great risk but also exposes Californians to greater pollution here at home.”

Europe’s emissions trading system, the largest carbon market in the world -- itself beset by scandals and failure to reduce emissions in Europe -- does not accept REDD credits. The EU says reductions in carbon emissions from forest preservation are impossible to verify accurately, that preserving one forest in one place may only drive deforestation to another area, and that industrial pollution remains in the atmosphere for centuries while forests are more vulnerable to short-term changes.

Tropical forests have unique social, economic and cultural significance to those who live in and depend on them for their livelihoods. But REDD projects like the one California is considering raise serious concerns about violations of the rights of forest dwellers.

"Forest carbon projects are causing grave human rights abuses, including evictions, land grabs, jailing, persecution of activists and violations of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” said Alberto Saldamando, a spokesman for the Indigenous Environmental Network. "California should not repeat its mistakes of the past with regard to indigenous peoples, in order to let polluters continue to pollute."

Organizations in Acre and Chiapas who sent letters to California policymakers last week denounced the proposed program as “neocolonial” and “incoherent.” Objections have also been sent by Friends of the Earth Latin America and Caribbean and Oilwatch International urging that “common sense requires that we end fossil fuel addiction, not let corporations continue to profit while setting the planet ablaze.”

Environmental justice advocates also pointed out that communities in the shadow of polluting industries, like Chevron’s refinery in Richmond and Shell’s in Martinez, see REDD as a failure to address their concerns as well.

"We have struggled to ensure that ARB addresses the needs of low-income communities and communities of color in AB 32 implementation,” said Strela Cervas, coordinator of the California Environmental Justice Alliance. “But they have continued to pass harmful and ineffective offset programs that only benefit big polluters. ARB has shown little concern for communities of color here at home -- how can we expect them to ensure a California REDD program will protect the rights of communities abroad?"

“To really tackle tropical deforestation at its root,” the letter recommends, “California policymakers should consider examining how the state’s existing policies…may enable rainforest destruction through contributing to demand for petroleum, timber, soy, paper, palm oil, and other commodities.”

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Contact:
Jeff Conant, +1 (510) 900-0016, jconant@foe.org

Fossil fuel export proposals explode around the world

Marcie Keever — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:07:04 -0400

With the reliance on coal declining in places like the U.S. and Australia, Big Coal has found another way to offload its dirty goods — by shipping it overseas. The global coal trade expanded by over 13 percent in 2010 and last year the U.S. hit a record in the amount of coal it shipped offshore. ClimateProgress reported that last year, US coal exports resulted in 292 million metric tons of carbon pollution “equivalent to the average annual greenhouse gas emissions from 55 million passenger vehicles, or to 75 coal-fired power plants — and in excess of the 2009 greenhouse gas emissions of the state of New York.” And the trend is expected to continue.

Not only are there four coal export terminals proposed in the Pacific Northwest (along with numerous efforts to increase exports of tar sands oil, LNG and oil shale out of the region) that we are fighting in coalition with Power Past Coal, there are massive fossil fuel export expansion plans in Australia where the proposals are to roughly double the volume of coal exports from the region.

Sadly, the Great Barrier Reef literally sits in the way of the fossil fuel industry and its massive expansion plans and has already suffered terrible damage from a Chinese coal ship grounding and subsequent oil spill in 2010. There are so many new coal terminals planned that just one port, Abbot Point, near Mackay, Queensland could increase almost nine-fold in capacity to become by far the biggest coal export port in the world.

Today, Market Forces and 350.org revealed the role of banks in financing this destruction of the Reef in a report, aptly titled Financing Reef Destruction. It brings together five years of data to identify the banks that have lent the most money to coal ports and liquefied natural gas plants inside the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area from 2008 to 2012.

You can download the report here.

The report draws attention to the critical role that the ‘big four’ Australian banks play in enabling new coal and gas projects to come online. Together, the biggest Australian banks – ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, NAB and Westpac – lent $3.8 billion to coal ports and liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals between 2008 and 2012.

It isn’t just Australian banks financing Big Coal. The U.S. Export-Import Bank was behind the single-biggest loan to a fossil fuel export project in the Great Barrier Reef, the $2.8 billion credit to the Australia Pacific LNG project. This loan has become the subject of legal action over alleged violations of the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

In 2012 Ex-Im Bank provided a $90 million loan guarantee to Xcoal Energy & Resources, the U.S.’s leading coal export company. This deal puts U.S. taxpayers on the hook for Xcoal’s bank loans and perpetuates our global addiction to coal. In addition to coal export loans in the U.S. and Australia, Ex-Im Bank helped U.S. coal interests fund the giant Sasan coal power plant in South Africa in 2010 and in 2011 it financed the Kusile coal plant in South Africa -- two of the world’s biggest coal plants.

In addition to Ex-Im Bank, China's largest banks, including China Development Bank, China Ex-Im Bank, and Bank of China, have thrown their weight into financing coal ports and LNG plants. However, financing such dirty projects in an area considered to be one of the world's natural wonders is certainly in violation of China's own policies, which specifically mandate Chinese companies and banks operating abroad to protect the local environment and adhere to international safeguards. The notorious grounding of the Chinese coal ship in 2010, which was carrying 65,000 tons of coal to China, already signaled China's indifference to safeguarding the extremely fragile ecosystem, and transforming the Great Barrier Reef into a super highway for coal shipped to China and Asia could mean disaster for the world's largest reef system.

In the U.S. we have started to realize that coal, with its dirty impacts from mine mouth to smokestack, is a problem and not a solution -- and it is certainly not a problem we should be exporting to the world.

Photo Courtesy of The Los Angeles Times

More than half a million Americans call on Obama administration to stop risky and dangerous drilling in the Arctic Ocean since Kulluk incident

Adam Russell — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:12:30 -0400

WASHINGTON, DC -- Today, a coalition of organizations announced that more than 500,000 Americans in the past three months have joined the call to demand the Obama administration put a stop to risky and dangerous drilling in the Arctic Ocean in light of Shell’s mishaps, such as its ill-fated Kulluk drilling rig that ran aground in Alaska on December 31, 2012. To date nearly two million voices have spoken out against drilling in the Arctic Ocean over the past few years.

The groups listed below have been mobilizing and organizing activists online and offline to add their names to the push to protect the Arctic Ocean from Shell and other Big Oil companies – and the momentum is working, as Shell has already cancelled plans to drill this year after 12 months of errors, mishaps, and near-disasters:

The Coalition Released the Following Statement:

“For hundreds of thousands of Americans, seeing Shell’s drilling rig run aground in the harsh Arctic weather last December was the last straw. The outpouring of action since then is a loud and clear signal that President Obama should suspend all risky and dangerous drilling activities in the Arctic Ocean.

In one year, one of Shell’s ships caught fire, rigs lost control, ran aground, and became the subject of criminal investigations, proving time and time again companies are not prepared for the Arctic. On March 14, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar admitted that ‘Shell screwed up’ and announced it would not be allowed back into the Arctic without major changes. The nearly 2 million Americans who have spoken up recognize that if the largest and wealthiest company in the world cannot figure out how to drill safely in the Arctic, all of this risky and dangerous drilling should be put on hold immediately.

Now, it’s time the Obama administration recognizes the same thing and reflects it in policy. The administration should not make any new decisions until it has completed a more thorough review of all drilling operations in the Arctic, implemented the most rigorous standards and determined whether and under what conditions to allow offshore drilling. As nominee for Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell should prioritize these challenges, and make sure that the Interior Department does not make the same mistakes again, acting immediately to put a pause in the Arctic until this in-depth review is complete.

The threat to America’s Arctic from drilling doesn’t just stop at spills and disasters, and the destruction of one of our most pristine places. Dredging up more dirty fuels and then burning them into our atmosphere is a one-two punch for America’s Arctic, destroying one of our most pristine places and making the climate crisis that is melting the region even worse. The administration can’t build a climate change legacy while drilling in the Arctic Ocean.

In one year, Shell proved beyond a doubt that no Big Oil company is prepared to drill in the Arctic and the potential threats this destructive practice would pose are numerous. But, if the Obama administration needed another reason to rethink the United States’ Arctic Ocean drilling program, they now have nearly 2 million more of them.”

The coalition included the following members:

Sierra Club – Alaska Wilderness League – Center for Biological Diversity – Friends of the Earth – Greenpeace – Earthjustice – National Audubon Society – Natural Resources Defense Council – The Wilderness Society – League of Conservation Voters – CREDO

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Contact:
Trey Pollard, Sierra Club, (202) 495-3058
Gwen Dobbs, Alaska Wilderness League, (202) 266-0418
Rebecca Noblin, Center for Biological Diversity, (907) 274-1110
Marcie Keever, Friends of the Earth, (510) 900-3144
Keiller MacDuff, Greenpeace, (202) 679-2236
Kari Birdseye, Earthjustice, (415) 217-2098
David Ringer, National Audubon Society, (212) 979-3062
Jake Thompson, Natural Resources Defense Council, (202) 289-2387
Tim Woody, The Wilderness Society, (907) 223-2443
Jeff Gohringer, League of Conservation Voters, (202) 454-4573
Sarah Lane, CREDO, (415) 369-2014

Why the World Bank must end its support for palm oil in Honduras

Jeff Conant — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:43:43 -0400

In a press release issued yesterday by Friends of the Earth International, we asked for cancellation of a World Bank loan to Honduran palm oil producer Grupo Dinant. Here's why:

Around the world, the palm oil industry is fast becoming recognized as a “leader” in ecological destruction and human rights abuse. Some of the companies drawing most attention are huge Indonesian and Malaysian firms, including Wilmar International and Sime Darby. Wilmar has been involved in such repeated abuses that institutional investors like the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund have dropped their stocks from its portfolio, while Sime Darby, whose abuses are equally grave, may be next on the list.

But palm oil is an equal-opportunity market that relies on cheap labor and large expanses of land to turn a profit. As such, small-ish players in small countries are just as capable as the large global firms in wreaking havoc.

Grupo Dinant in Honduras is one such company, whose track record of violence and land grabbing implicates it in some of the most serious abuses of human rights in Central America today. The company, owned by a single wealthy individual, runs a virtual terror campaign to ensure control of a large swath of land in the Lower Aguan Valley near the Caribbean coast of Honduras. I visited the area years ago, and wrote about it in 2011, when a recent surge of killings brought to light the fact that the company was actually receiving Certified Emissions Credits under the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism.

As Friends of the Earth International and allied NGOs made clear in a press release yesterday, the violence and impunity continue. Today, with 89 peasant farmers dead in the Aguan Valley, Grupo Dinant is in the spotlight again, as the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), which has loaned $30 million to the company, has requested that Dinant hire an international security consultant assess its security program and to provide training for the company’s security forces.

The memo from IFC says that the consultant will “work with Dinant to develop a Corporate Security Policy and Code of Ethics based on the UN Voluntary Principles for Business and Human Rights (VPBHR).” But given that Dinant’s security force consists of known paramilitaries, and given the track record of abuse and impunity in the region, retraining them to respect human rights is akin to training pit bulls to act like poodles by putting pink ribbons on them. That is, it’s a distraction, and a dangerous one.

Dinant’s oil palm plantations have been at the center of land conflicts dating back to the 1970s. Despite a long history of conflict, the IFC paid the first of two $15 million loan installments to Grupo Dinant in November, 2009 – shortly after a military coup had ousted the democratically elected president. The coup was publicly supported by Grupo Dinant’s CEO, Miguel Facusse.

Since the coup, Dinant and another palm oil company have been implicated in the murder of dozens of peasants. Killings are continuing with complete impunity, the region around the plantations has been heavily militarized, and long-standing peasant communities have been violently evicted. Yet the World Bank’s loan assessment – updated last month – claims: “Dinant understands the importance of having good relationships with their neighboring communities and are quite proactive in this regard.”

The recent statement from the IFC follows on an audit from the IFC’s own Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO) which states that that “IFC’s performance in relation to this project merited further enquiry,” including consideration of “whether IFC policies and procedures provide adequate guidance to staff on how to manage social risks associated with Projects [sic] in areas that are subject to conflict or conflict.”

The CAO exists thanks to years of civil society demands, and while it is laudable that the body is taking the case seriously, the bureaucratic language masks a grim reality. The IFC’s response – retraining thugs to quit being thugs – would be laughable, were it not for the lives involved.

In 2011, FIAN, an international NGO working for food rights, produced a report on human rights violations in Bajo Aguán, documenting “evidence of the involvement of private security forces hired by Dinant and other companies owned by Miguel Facussé in human rights abuses and, in particular, in the murder of peasants in Bajo Aguán.” When the report was brought to the German development bank DEG, the Bank confirmed FIAN’s findings and canceled a $20 million loan to Dinant.

Still, the violence continued, supported by the IFC.

A 2012 public hearing on the human rights situation in the peasant communities of the lower Aguán concluded that the agrarian conflict there is the “most serious situation in terms of violence against peasants in Central America in the last fifteen years.”

Still, the violence continued, supported by the IFC.

The IFC’s statement says that the agency “has engaged with the company and government to help identify a peaceful solution,” that “Grupo Dinant is cooperating with its investigations,” and that “the company’s approach is to handle land claims and occupations through the Honduran courts.”

None of this considers the fact – well-evidenced through years of independent investigation – that the company is, in fact, the aggressor, and that the government of Honduras cannot be expected to reign in a company run by one of the country’s most powerful and well-connected individuals.

Does the World Bank really expect that security forces who have acted with impunity on behalf of a company that is closely allied with the illegitimate coup government of Honduras can be retrained to respect human rights?

At best, you’ll get them to do a better job of burying their victims and their crimes, and carrying on with business as usual – which, ultimately, may be all that the IFC really wants to do.

To view the FoEI press release, click here.

Repository of Friends of the Earth submissions on the IMO’s Polar Code

John Kaltenstein — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:14:19 -0500

With Arctic sea ice melting dramatically due to global warming and natural resource development and trade on the upswing, the region is confronting substantial growth in commercial shipping within its waters. Increased Arctic shipping raises threats not only to human health and welfare, but also to the Arctic’s pristine environment. Sewage dumping, oily bilge water discharges, oil and fuel spills, invasive species, toxic air pollutants, and climate-forcing emissions of black carbon are just some of the harms associated with increased ship traffic.

In light of these profound changes and emerging threats, Friends of the Earth has been engaged since early 2010 in deliberations surrounding the development of mandatory rules for Arctic and Antarctic shipping known as the Polar Code. Friends of the Earth participates in the proceedings at the International Maritime Organization in London, UK -- a specialized UN agency that sets global shipping standards -- through an observer seat held by Friends of the Earth International. At the IMO, we are an outspoken advocate for strong polar shipping regulations, focusing primarily on the Arctic region. (Our partner, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, provides expertise on issues concerning the Antarctic.) During IMO meetings, Friends of the Earth makes oral statements, gives sidebar presentations, and, generally, works to build support for our environmental positions among IMO member nations, intergovernmental organizations (e.g. European Commission), and industry NGOs.

An important part of these efforts includes submitting documents to the IMO that make the case for why we need particular environmental provisions in the Polar Code. Friends of the Earth, in collaboration with other environmental NGO partners, has produced and submitted over 20 documents to the IMO on environmental topics relevant to the Polar Code. Friends of the Earth's submitted documents can be found below, arranged according to the IMO committee or subcommittee in which they were presented.

IMO Marine Environment Protection Committee 62 (July 11-15, 2011): Black Carbon and Whales

IMO Safety of Navigation Sub-Committee 57 (June 6-10, 2011): Whales 1 and Whales 2

IMO Design and Equipment Sub-Committee 57 (March 18-22, 2013) : Heavy Fuel Oil, Garbage & Invasive Species, Wastewater, Black Carbon, and Oil Pollution

IMO Design and Equipment Sub-Committee 56 (February 13-17, 2012): Various Provisions, Heavy Fuel Oil 1, Heavy Fuel Oil 2, and Incineration

IMO Design and Equipment Sub-Committee 55 (March 21-25, 2011): Boundaries 1, Boundaries 2, Black Carbon, Monitoring, Whales, Packages & Containers, Wastewater, and Definition of Pollutant

IMO Design and Equipment Sub-Committee 54 (October 25-29, 2010): MARPOL and Non-MARPOL

IMO Design and Equipment Sub-Committee 53 (February 22-26, 2010): Overview

Photo: Spotted seal on icefloe

Source: Dave Withrow, NOAA

The cruise industry screws up and we pay the price

Marcie Keever — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:18:50 -0500

The Carnival Triumph’s “cruise from hell”…the tragic capsizing of the Costa Concordia in Italian waters…the Shell oil rig that ran aground on a small island south of Kodiak, Alaska…

…there hasn’t been a lot of good news in the last few months for the cruise and shipping industries. In fact, the rash of accidents and cruise ship horror stories has cast a spotlight on the safety and environmental practices of cruise ships and other ocean-going vessels around the world.

It’s no secret that the cruise and shipping industries are some of the biggest polluters around. For several years, Friends of the Earth has been rating cruise ships on their air and water pollution footprints, exposing the dirty practices behind those luxury vacations.

But there’s another dirty little secret behind the cruise industry’s success: according to a New York Times report by David Leonhardt:

“Over the last five years, the company [Carnival] has paid total corporate taxes -- federal, state, local and foreign -- equal to only 1.1 percent of its cumulative $11.3 billion in profits.”

In the wake of the Carnival Triumph disaster, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV expressed his concern about the cruise ship industry as a whole, saying, “It is time that the cruise line industry -- which earns more than $25 billion a year -- pays for the costs they impose on the government since it’s the Coast Guard that comes to the rescue every single time something goes wrong on a cruise ship.”

The entire cruise industry depends on a series of legal and tax loopholes to keep its profits flowing…and to keep you and me subsidizing their dirty industry.

And that’s not the only price we pay. We’re also paying far too high a price from the industry’s water and air pollution.

Friends of the Earth’s 2012 Cruise Ship Report Card ranks 15 major cruise lines and 148 cruise ships for their air and water pollution footprints. And although we handed out the first-ever ‘A’ grade, the biggest takeaway from this year’s report card is that many cruise lines continue to make halfhearted or zero effort to reduce their air and water pollution impacts.

Indeed, the Carnival Triumph -- the ship that lost power off the Yucatan peninsula, stranding passengers for days aboard a foundering ship -- received ‘F’s’ across the board on Friends of the Earth’s report card.

Although it may take a year or more to determine the exact cause of the fire on the Carnival Triumph, the cruise line is notorious for neglecting environmental upgrades like adding the capability to plug in to shorepower when docked. In fact, our report card found that only 23 out of 148 ships have made that upgrade, which could save lives each year by eliminating the air pollution ships emit when generating power using dirty heavy fuel oil.

And shorepower is just one of the ways the cruise industry should clean up their operations. They dump dirty wastewater and pump air pollutants into the environment threatening both marine and human populations. They use dirty, bottom-of-the-barrel bunker fuel, which, when burned, produces tiny particles that degrade air quality and cause illnesses like asthma and lung cancer.

Local communities are taking action. California has banned bunker fuel and instituted a No Discharge Zone in coastal waters. In Charleston, SC, a debate rages over whether to build a new ship terminal that could increase the frequency of cruise ships visiting the historic city in addition to the tripling of cruise ship trips the city has seen since 2009. And voters in Key West, FL are considering whether to approve the widening of a channel to the city’s ports to accommodate new, larger cruise ships.

Unfortunately, the powerful cruise ship industry is not going down without a fight. Alaskan lawmakers bowed to pressure from the cruise ship industry, recently approving a measure that would override wastewater standards for cruise ships that Alaskans approved in 2006.

As the cruise industry continues to grow, the onus is on local communities to understand the truth about the cruise ships docking in their midst. They cannot afford to take the cruise ship industry’s word that it will behave or assume strong regulations are in place to govern their pollution streams.

And the cruise industry isn’t the only one gaming the system. After the Shell oil rig ran aground, reports emerged that Shell had originally rushed the rig through dangerous weather in an attempt to avoid paying millions in state taxes to Alaska, which it would have owed the state if the rig had remained in Alaskan waters through January 1.

It’s time for all of us to take a hard look at the shipping industry. The damage they cause to our environment, to public health, and to our public coffers is untenable.

Photo: Coast Guard Aviation Training Center Mobile MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew as they deliver approximately 3,000 pounds of equipment, which included a generator and electrical cables, from the offshore supply vessel Lana Rose to the Carnival Cruise Ship Triumph in the Gulf of Mexico,on February 13, 2013. Credit: AFP PHOTO / US COAST GUARD/PAUL MCCONNELL.

Synthetic biology and the “bioeconomy”: Feeding fuel to the fire of landgrabs and biodiversity loss

Jeff Conant and Eric Hoffman — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 11:08:00 -0500

When our friends at Global Forest Coalition asked us to write an article examining the links between the synthetic biology industry and trends in the forest sector, we were happy to put together the following article, a version of which has just run in their magazine, Forest Cover. -- Eric Hoffman and Jeff Conant

One of the driving factors in the first industrial revolution was the large-scale substitution of fossil fuels for wood, which had been the primary source of energy for millennia: when it came to energy production, trees took a back seat to oil and coal. Now, after our fossil fuel addiction has ravaged the global ecosystem, a second industrial revolution is underway which promises to reverse this paradigm – but not necessarily for the better.

With the rapid development of a set of new technologies collectively known as ‘synthetic biology’, industry groups and the US Department of Energy are celebrating the advent of a new ‘bioeconomy’ — an energy and materials economy being promoted in the US, the EU and other countries, in which products and processes previously derived from petroleum will be produced by using biotechnology. By employing the rapidly expanding techniques of synthetic biology, the new industrialists want to turn microbes into ‘living chemical factories’. These genetically-altered microbes — yeasts, e-coli, algae and other living organisms — are now being engineered to break down biomass — living plants — to produce substances they would not produce naturally, such as biofuels, bio-plastics, industrial chemicals and oils, and even medicines.

There is of course a great need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, and a great imperative to employ the best science at our disposal to enable the transition. However, early indications show that simply swapping out petrochemicals for biomass-based fuels likely harbors all of the ill-effects of the fossil fuel economy, and brings the additional threat of ramping up the assault on biodiversity brought on by biotechnologies such as genetic engineering of crops.

Humans have already caused a state-shift in the global ecosystem, bringing the planet into a new geological era - the Anthropocene – where the collective impact of human technology has outstripped nature as the most potent force driving ecological cycles. So what happens when we turn to biomass and synthetic biology to run our industrial energy, food, and materials production systems?

These new ‘synthetic biology’ technologies push the limits of what was previously possible with ‘conventional’ genetic engineering. Rather than moving one or two genes between different organisms, as conventional genetic engineering does, synthetic biology is enabling the writing and re-writing of genetic code on a computer, working with hundreds and thousands of DNA sequences at a time, and even trying to re-engineer entire biological systems. Synthetic biology’s technique, scale, and its use of entirely new, artificial genetic sequences make it, in essence, an extreme and highly unpredictable form of genetic engineering.

Synthetic biology is a nascent but rapidly growing field, worth over US$1.6 billion in annual global sales today and expected to grow to US$10.8 billion by 2016. Many of the largest energy, chemical, forestry, pharmaceutical, food and agribusiness corporations are investing in synthetic biology research and development, or establishing joint ventures, in a race for this holy grail of biotech. A handful of products derived from synthetic biology have already reached the commercial market. Many others are in pre-commercial stages.

Critically, all these microbial production processes depend on the availability of industrial-scale supplies of feedstocks for fermentation tanks and bio-refineries. These include sugars derived from agricultural and forest biomass (both from natural forests and from monoculture tree plantations). This could have enormous impacts on biodiversity, and the livelihoods and food security of local and indigenous communities. With an estimated 86% of global biomass stored in the tropics or subtropics, developing countries are already being tapped as the major source of biomass.

But as the first signs of this biomass- and forest-grabbing begin to emerge, the temperate forests of the North are not off the hook either. A company called Mascoma, for example, has patented a technology it calls Consolidated Bioprocessing (CBP) in which “genetically modified yeast and bacteria convert cellulosic biomass into high-value end-products in a single step that combines hydrolysis and fermentation.” In 2011, ethanol producer Valero Energy offered US$50 million to build a refinery that would use Mascoma’s CBP process to turn wood into ethanol. The plant, in northern Michigan, is expected to produce 20 million gallons of ethanol a year to begin with, but eventually expand production to 80 million gallons per year.

According to the environmental assessment of the Mascoma plant, its mid-range production, 40 million gallons of ethanol a year, would require 71,000 acres of timber annually (given that it takes roughly one acre of forest to produce 563 gallons of ethanol).

What does this look like at scale? The US renewable fuel standard calls for no less than 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuel by 2022. At 563 gallons per acre, that would require 28,419,182 acres of forest per year — an area of forest just shy of the entire state of New York, to be eaten by synthetic bugs and burned up as fuel every year — hardly what you’d think of as ‘sustainable.’ And, as Rachel Smolker of Biofuelwatch has pointed out, that is just for a portion of liquid transport fuels, on top of rapidly expanding plans to burn biomass for electricity and to manufacture a wide range of industrial products.

The dream of cellulosic biofuels is that they will (or so goes the theory) avoid the food-for-fuel conundrum that was a major factor in the world food crisis of 2007. In fact, so-called ‘next generation’ fuels will only exacerbate this problem, by transforming ‘low-value’ forest and agricultural ‘wastes’ such as straw, leaves and branches into high-value feedstocks. The chemical and energy companies boosting synthetic biology and biofuels argue that they will grow biomass on unused ‘marginal’ lands. But, for land-based people in the global South, no lands are ‘marginal’; and for the complex dynamics of forests and agro-ecosystems, what industry posits as ‘wastes’ are important components the recycling of nutrients in soil, promoting biodiversity, and sequestering CO².

Furthermore, the innovation of using synthetic microbes to break down cellulose makes all biomass potential fodder for fuel-production. While this may sound desirable from an industrial growth perspective, it will further incentivize the expansion of existing ethanol feedstocks, such as sugar and eucalyptus, into sensitive areas like the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, accompanied by huge demands for water, fertilizer, and cheap labor. It will also put the entire terrestrial biosphere up for grabs as a fuel source.

While Mascoma is preparing to transform America’s northern woods into chips with its cellulose-eating microbes, another company leading the bioeconomy land rush, ArborGen, is genetically engineering trees to grow with less lignin – the woody stuff that makes trees stand up – so that they can be more easily converted into sugar for biofuels. Through their work sequencing the genomes of eucalyptus, pine, and poplar, ArborGen is tied to the US Department of Energy’s National Laboratories and to the Joint Bioenergy Institute, a public-private venture whose primary mission is to develop the next generation of biofuels.

With the advent of the bioeconomy, our approach to energy, manufacturing and consumption is poised to wreak havoc on the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Yet despite these technologies’ rapid growth, there are no national or international regulations to insulate biodiversity and livelihoods from the potential ravages of synthetic biology and biomass energy and production. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity has started to look at these issues, but failed to implement a moratorium at its recent negotiations in October 2012.

In the face of this new bio-industrial revolution, civil society, social movements, NGOs and governments must come together to bring an end to all forms of land and biomass grabbing. In addition, there must be a moratorium on synthetic biology – something Friends of the Earth is pushing for internationally – to ensure this emerging technology is properly regulated and does not threaten the environment, biodiversity, human health, or social justice.