OilWatch Position Statement regarding the 17th World Petroleum Congress

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - September 1-5, 2002

At Rio de Janeiro, 10 years after the Summit for Sustainable Development, a new Summit takes place, the Global Disaster Summit. The 17th World Petroleum Congress has chosen Rio de Janeiro to get together and tell the world their objective 10 years after: Rule the World. And they are fulfilling this in many spheres.

The new face of Trans National Companies wants to become Green. They invest in clean energies, job-for-everyone advertising and social benefits, and now, in Sustainable Development.

The proposal is impel joint projects between Companies and National States, known as Partnerships (Type II Initiatives) in order to solve the challenges of Sustainable Development.

These proposals are being simultaneously launched at the Summit for Sustainable Development at Johannesburgh and at World Petroleum Congress in Rio de Janeiro. These are proposals that succesfully in most cases consumate a long process of privatization of national companies, weakening of National States and infiltrating multilateral spheres, such as the United Nations.

With these proposals, TNC´s will come to fill the empty room left by the deliberate destruction of the National States, the States´patrimony will be finally delivered to private companies, the already billionaire subsidies will be broadened, and under the figure of healthy environment incentives, the environmental control will be delivered to them.

Meanwhile, us citizens will have muted from service users to captive costumers without a voice or decision capacity.

Among projects claiming to aim at sustainable development we find, for example, the promotion of the use of gas and construction of gas pipelines, despite being projects that are being halted by local communities because of their destructive nature. A model of solar energy is being promoted, one monopolized by TNCs, turning us absolutely dependent and pushing the poor away from this alternative.

Therefore we propose:

· Condemn and demask the new strategy of Companies to take over the control of natural resources, over the Governments of the South, and on Clean Technologies.

The goal of the Oil Industry is to gain and amass financial resources, and now it proclaims itself as part of the solution to socio–environmental conflicts, and they propose to duck into every aspect of the search for Sustainable Development. Oil companies want to turn the environment into a market, and use this path to raise their subsidies and remain in impunity.

· Promote the Moratorium to Oil Activities

We cannot deny mounting scientific evidence demonstrating that Climate Change is caused by the flaring of Fossil Fuels. If we remain flaring, the planet will collapse. To keep on is unjustifiable. OilWatch then declares a Moratorium to Oil Activities. This Moratorium can be promoted from government levels (as the case of Costa Rican elected President, Dr. Abel Pacheco), and from local spheres, through the sovereign peoples´ decision, whom through resistance, struggle so that their traditional territories won´t be opened to new oil explorations.

· Dennounce and make visible the impacts of oil activities

Oil Companies have lead to the destruction of indigenous territories, the pollution of jungles and forests and fragile ecosystems, they have destroyed the base for subsistance of local communities connected to forests and seas. They are responsible for diseases as cancer, leukemia, and skin diseases in peasant populations affected by oil development.

They are also resposible for the impacts and violence of Climate Change. And they also motivate, promote, or fund deaths and violence for the control or fossil resources and routes for their extraction, transport and marketing (i.e. Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico, Sudan, and many other countries in the world that live wars for the control of the resources in the subsoil).

· Deny all gas exploration and transport projects as clean energy sources.

Gas extraction and transportation causes the same local environmental impacts as oil developments. To deal with these projects in a different manner than with oil projects is the Industry´s new strategy, mainly supported by the Multilateral Banking System, to keep on investing on Fossil Fuels, despite being condemmed for the impacts these provoke.

· To build paths to gain control over TNC´s and avoid their empowerment.

TNCs have achieved to institutionalize voluntary agreemens and proposals, to gain environmental control, therefore weakening the controlling function of National States and the society. Oil Companies are not under any control and have fulfilled a status that releases them from international commitments. The only possibility of exerting control over them is by surveillance, dennouncing and movilization, avoiding their propaganda from hiding the truth, and their money from increasing corruption of governments, and of public and private financing sources.

· Distrust any proposal of “Technology Transfer” of Companies´

Oil Companies search for a new business, through monopolizing renewable energies and their technological processes. Shell Petroleum Company and others such as BP, invest billionaire amounts of money in solar energy, developing for example, photovoltaic cells, which with will undoubtlessly in the future will provide them of the monopolic control of these new technologies, and will make them unreachable for peoples and decapitalized countries.

Their strategy is exerting monopoly, and if they achieve this in the field of renewable energies, we will lose a chance.

Another type of proposed technology transfers, deals with expired technologies that can no longer find a market in industrialized countries.

· Work nationally to achieve Energy Sovereignty

Energy sovereignty must allow countries and peoples to exert control on their space, their culture and their future. It must include the whole process, since energy obtention and transformation, from alternative, decentralized, renewable, low impact energy sources; until their democratic and conscious use.

South-South Exchanges are a source of knowledge and inspiration of policies, technologies and energy alternatives that restate sovereignty.

OilWatch has gathered to publicly dennounce:

Oil and its companies are putting and end to the world

Trans National Companies consolidate their power and have built a regime of maximum profits and of total impunity

Nevertheless, the struggle against TNCs has been declared. Hundreds of peoples´ confront them, and the whole world is learning that a world without Trans Nationals would be much better.

Joining this declaration, images of fires, spills and destruction of the most known oil companies, OilWatch publicly holds its dennounce.

See images on page: www.oilwatch.org.ec