A. Planet Earth and fossil fuels

Ever increasing prospecting, extraction, transportation, refining and consumption of oil and gas are having dangerous impacts at local, national and global levels. Ecosystems are being destroyed; national economies are being depleted of capital; the climate is changing and wars are being fought over hydrocarbons. The survival of whole peoples is at risk.

In spite of the fact that the burning of existing reserves of fossil hydrocarbons would greatly exceed the planet's capacity to accommodate the resulting greenhouse gas increases, fossil fuel exploration continues at increasingly distant frontiers, in ever more fragile zones, and with increasingly violent methods, including warfare.

However, very little is being done about the problem. And the little that is being done is counterproductive.

Emissions trading, the Clean Development Mechanism, and the Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) do not by themselves reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. Instead, many of the projects carried out under these rubrics merely transfer responsibilities and impacts to the South, creating new threats to local peoples. Carbon plantations occupy territories, lands are mortgaged, forests are handed over to private companies, and protected areas are privatised.

While communities resisting oil exploitation directly prevent the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, the World Bank promotes and finances greater use of fossil fuels, both through direct subsidies for exploration and through PCF projects which supposedly "compensate" for fossil fuel burning. If in the past the Bank's projects resulted in the atmosphere's being used to absorb the emissions of industrialized elites, today its projects are leading to new occupations of peoples' territories for "climate mitigation".

B. The dangerous market created by the World Bank

The World Bank is helping open up a new and dangerous market, the carbon market. Its Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF), set up as a mutual fund, facilitates negotiations between corporate or governmental investors who want to invest in carbon projects and entities selling emission certificates.

At the same time that the PCF is aimed at subsidizing projects that are claimed, falsely, to "reduce" emissions verifiably, the World Bank's energy policies promote the use of fossil fuels, particularly gas. In particular, the Bank is supporting the construction of a series of oil and gas pipelines crossing fragile zones, such as the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, the West African gas pipeline, the gas pipelines to be built in Indonesia and the Bolivia-Brazil gas pipeline, among others.

The impacts caused by these projects are:

- Destruction of the basis of local community survival and life;
- Violation of human rights;
- Expropriation of peasant and indigenous lands in oil areas and along routes and pipelines;
- Reduction in security for those who live near the pipeline and pumping stations, due to the possibility of spills and explosions;
- More work for women, as well as more sexual abuse and violence;
- Deleterious effects on children, due to increased insecurity;
- Increased risk of proliferation of various sexually transmitted and tropical diseases;
- Growth in environmental racism;
- Increased incidence of disputes within communities;
- Splitting up of wildlife habitats and corridors;
- Obstruction of water bodies;
- Direct deforestation through the opening up of paths to build pipelines;
- Indirect deforestation through the construction of highway networks opening up new areas to exploitation;
- Free appropriation of other resources in oil and gas concessions including water, timber, biodiversity and ballast material;
- Extinction of animal species;
- Accumulation of waste, some of which is toxic;
- Increased vulnerability of local peoples to climatic disasters through removal of soil, changes in rainfall patterns and temperature, damming of rivers, etc.

The policies of international and regional financial bodies tend to ignore these risks and to promote more and larger energy facilities.

C. Carbon trading: A solution or a complication?

At present, two broad approaches to the problem of climatic change are in confrontation. One is centred on a drastic and accelerating reduction of the use of fossil fuels, recognizing the inequitable and unsustainable use of the atmosphere to date. The other concentrates largely on manipulating ecosystems and thus increasing their power to trap CO2.

The struggles of various peoples to prevent new oil frontiers from opening up, campaigns by environmental groups for a moratorium on the expansion of the oil frontier, efforts made by island states to secure emissions reductions, even incipient commitments by some nations, regions, states or cities to freeze emissions -- all are in line with the first approach.

The second approach, by contrast, centres on such projects as the promotion of tree plantations as carbon sinks and a series of experiments designed to hide carbon under the sea or in geological formations. These projects encourage further fossil fuel developments through the sale of what are known as "environmental services".

The first approach is framed by considerations of global justice, recognises South-North inequality, identifies the problem and aims at solving it. It recognises the historical debt of the industrialized societies that have occupied the lion's share of the atmosphere of the whole planet.

The second approach assumes unequal use of the atmosphere as a right or at least a necessity bestowed by history. Here the priority is to maintain the rich world's relative level of consumption for as long as possible by trying to increase the capacity of the biosphere to trap carbon by, for example, installing plantations in the South.

The differences in approach are not only political but also technical.

According to the first approach, the best way of decreasing the uptake of carbon into the atmosphere is to leave it underground, where it remains safely isolated. This approach also prevents local damage caused by prospecting and extraction.

The second approach necessitates convincing the world of the dubious claim that plantations and other such "sinks" will be climatically effective. It means having to offer unfeasibly precise calculations of how long plantations will remain standing without being burnt down, cut down, sold or affected by pests. It means making light of the deleterious impacts of plantations on local peoples, who are deprived of rights over their territories, their trees, or their way of life. And it means ignoring the fact that the communities must bear the brunt of having to take care of the plantations while receiving little in return and abstaining from other uses of their land or forests.

D. Environmental services: the mechanism for emissions trading

Emissions trading requires the creation of a new quasi-commodity, one of many such "environmental services" now being created by the rich world.

"Environmental services" convert what ecosystems do into merchandise: air, water and the maintenance of biodiversity. The idea seems to have the merit of enabling local populations to collect money for forest maintenance. However, in practice, it necessitates depriving local people of their rights and their control over land, water and living things, guaranteeing rights only to buyers of the services.

The sale of environmental services goes hand in hand with a campaign to gain control over vast areas, many of them protected and others of strategic biological importance. Conservation NGOs are often delegated to acquire rights over management, planning and research in such areas, with two objectives in mind. On the one hand, land rights can be taken from local communities. On the other, access can be given to powerful outside interests through negotiations with trans-national conservation NGOs.

Where environmental services are sold outside protected areas, communities are likely to have to abandon traditional agricultural and gathering practices and become park wardens, taking care of trees and other aspects of the environment whose functions have already been sold to third parties.

Forests are great reservoirs of carbon. To conserve them is to avoid carbon emissions that would take up space those countries and companies from the North are interested in using for their industrial emissions. Hence renewed Northern interest in controlling Southern forests. In places where forests have disappeared or have been degraded (and sometimes even where they have not), monoculture plantations of exotic trees are slated to take their place, supposedly to boost the land's ability to mop up industrial carbon.

E. The true beneficiaries

Oil companies have kept up permanent campaigns to prevent reduction in oil consumption, at least until they can manage to make other energy sources, such as the sun, water and wind, subject to their monopolies. Yet some of these same companies, which include Shell and BP, are now attempting to negotiate carbon credits for their alternative energy investments.

Logging companies, too, seek to benefit twice over: the plantations for which they acquire carbon financing help launder their image as deforesters. In practice, this financing bankrolls new threats to native forests, since slowing logging is not an option.

Many development NGOs also seek to benefit from projects for the sale of environmental services, arguing that in this way they obtain resources for social investment. However, in doing so they manage to keep a technocracy alive that does more to mask than to resolve the key problems.

International conservation NGOs are probably the central actors in the "environmental services" strategy, which is carried out under the label of sustainable development and nature conservation. This strategy is international, involving partnerships between international conservation NGOs and their national counterparts. Both types of NGOs become "territorial managers," deciding what is investigated and for whom, which areas are to be set aside for resource extraction and which are to be conserved, etc. The best local people can hope for is to be appointed caretakers.

Organizations such as World Wide Fund for Nature, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Birdlife and others have already taken firm steps to solve the legal, funding and technical-capacity problems that stand in their way. They have managed to get themselves designated as implementers of the Biodiversity Convention. And on a national level they have managed to infiltrate national bodies, weakening them and interposing themselves as the sole possessors of the necessary technical capacity.

F. Those who are wronged

Local peoples who have lived with, conserved and enriched biodiversity are set to lose their rights over their territories and resources. Supposedly receiving resources for forest conservation or for renting out their lands, they will in fact have to renounce customary uses of their environment, and instead of being owners, will become park wardens.

States are likely to lose sovereignty over their heritage and territory when they turn over the management of such vast areas, many of them strategically located, to foreign institutions which guarantee corporate interests instead of peoples' interests.

Ecologists, defenders of human rights, and those struggling for global justice from all over the world, organized or not, are now witnessing new modes of usurpation and destruction. Previously deprived of a clean atmosphere, we are today threatened by having our land taken away from us in the name of that atmosphere.

For this reason, we must continue to struggle, to resist, to dream . . . and to work on making those dreams a reality.

* Oilwatch is an international network of 120 ecological, human rights, religious and local community organizations supporting resistance towards activities exploiting gas and oil in the tropics and denouncing local and global impacts from the standpoint of the countries of the South. E-mail: info@oilwatch.org.ec / Web site: www.oilwatch.org.ec