Fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas - need no introduction as the prime sources of greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, leading to overall rises in global temperature and the disruption of natural climate patterns. Encouraging their exploitation with public money is an absurd proposition as we stand only a few years away from a potential climate catastrophe. Fossil fuel operations have also been causing irreversible damage to ecosystems for decades, from Siberia's boreal forests to the mangroves of central America, from the rainforests of the Amazon basin and Africa to coastal and oceanic environments everywhere. Priceless biodiversity, the underlying fabric of life, is being lost every day.
Developing countries with few natural resources grew two to three times faster than resource-rich countries over the period 1960-2000, according to the World Bank. Globally, the extractive industries play a central role in the economies of over 50 developing countries; yet up to 1.5 billion people in these countries are estimated to live on less than two dollars a day. Twelve of the most mineral-dependent nations and six of the world's most oil-dependent states are classified as Highly Indebted Poor Countries by the World Bank. Fossil fuels extraction and pipeline construction hit poor, indigenous and rural communities the hardest. These people often lose their lands and livestock - their main source of food, income and livelihood - and suffer as a result of the pollution and environmental degradation caused by these investments. Very often they are forced to resettle without proper compensation or to work in dangerous conditions for poor pay. The most vivid example is Nigeria, a country where the economic benefits of oil production - estimated at over 20 billion dollars a year - have consistently not reached the most needy in society, and it seems unlikely that any additional income from the EIB-financed West African Gas pipeline (just one of many similar projects) will ever benefit them.
In a number of developing countries such as Chad, Nigeria, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, the extraction of fossil fuels is regularly accompanied by human rights abuses, especially when the military guards fossil fuels projects. The huge revenues generated by these projects have in many cases been seen to strengthen dictatorships and encourage corruption within public administration. Fossil fuel projects are all too often found in the middle of socially sensitive areas, where competition for the control of oil revenues has undermined democracy and caused or exacerbated civil wars and domestic armed conflicts. World Bank analyst Paul Collier has demonstrated that countries that depend on resource exports run a risk of civil war that is forty times greater than countries with no resource exports. In the case of the infamous Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, that received over 200 million dollars in loans from the EIB and the World Bank, oil revenues were misused by the Chadian government to arm local militia and thus aggravate existing tensions among ethnic groups.
Seventy percent of the world's poor are women. While women are most vulnerable to the negative impacts of fossil fuel projects, there are rarely any special provisions to ensure that they benefit from them. Fossil fuel projects bring fewer opportunities for paid employment to women making them more economically dependent on men, and at the same time they inflict more burden on them in their daily care for the house and the family by polluting agricultural land and water. Most acutely, the arrival of male workers for the construction of large scale infrastructure projects inevitably leads to increased violence and sexual abuse against women in local communities, increased prostitution and trafficking of women, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
The EIB has used European taxpayers' money to finance and effectively subsidise mega profit-making companies in the extractives sector. In 2007, the revenues of Shell, BP, Total and ENI (Agip) totaled a stunning EUR 698 billion, while in the same year Shell emitted more greenhouse gases than did Austria, Portugal and Hungary combined. Oil companies are benefiting from this "oil aid" at the same time that they register record profits. There are better things to do with public funds than support extremely wealthy and heavily polluting oil and gas companies.
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