14 May 2009 - Washington,
DC, United States — A piece of legislation
that started out as a real opportunity for
the US to combat climate change has been
co-opted by special interests and now threatens
to do more harm than good. The Waxman- Markey
bill is set to go before the
House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday
and could remove the ability of the US to
commit to real action on climate change
at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in
December.
According to reports,
the 600-page draft bill on energy and climate
originally aimed at providing solutions
to climate change - including a plan to
cap and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions
in the US - has become significantly weaker
over the past week and is no longer strong
enough to help the US do its part to combat
climate change.
Big business gets the
bail out
The draft bill has always failed to explain
how it would allocate the money made from
the sale of pollution permits within the
emissions cap and trade scheme proposed
by the bill. This money should be used to
build clean energy solutions – like a smart
grid. Instead, the discussion draft contains
giveaways and loopholes for the dirty coal
industry and false solutions such as Carbon
Capture and Sequestration (CCS) Even worse,
we are hearing reports that the bill has
become significantly worse in this area
over the past week. Bloomberg recently reported
that Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the
House Energy and Commerce Committee, is
offering as much as US $40 billion in free
pollution permits to “utilities, refiners
and manufacturers.”
President Obama initially
called for 100 percent of pollution permits
to be auctioned off and to use up to 83
percent of the revenues to help taxpayers
to pay for higher energy costs. According
to reports, the bill might actually end
up giving as much as 55 percent of the permits
away for free. The EU’s Emissions Trading
Scheme originally gave away so many permits
that pollution permits were trading for
as little as 1 euro cent, providing no incentive
for polluting industries to clean up their
act. Now the fossil fuels industries – who
have spent some $45 million lobbying against
the bill – are succeeding in convincing
House Democrats to make the same mistake.
False Solutions
There are also reports that giveaways to
companies researching Carbon Capture and
Sequestration, could be as much as US$10
billion. CCS is an unproven technology still
decades away from large-scale implementation
and is a dangerous distraction from real
climate change solutions. But that still
isn’t everything, the emissions targets
contained in the bill seem to get worse
and worse. The bill originally called for
roughly what scientists say is necessary
to avert the worst effects of climate change:
25 to 40 percent below 11000 emissions levels
by 2020. However, now the bill looks like
offering a cut of 4 percent on 11000 emission
levels. To make this look good the baseline
has been shifted to 2005, allowing the politicians
to present it as a much bigger cut . Even
worse, the conservative Democrats who have
been most instrumental in watering down
the bill are attempting to get that target
reduced even further, to 6 percent of 2005
levels by 2020.
The bill is set to go
before the full House Energy and Commerce
Committee by next Monday. Greenpeace, Friends
of the Earth and Public Citizen, have all
raised serious concerns about the direction
of the bill and called on committee not
to pass the bill as it is written now. Read
our statement in full. For more info, you
can also read Greenpeace’s original statement
on the Waxman-Markey draft bill, and Friends
of the Earth’s assessment.
President Obama cannot
let this situation continue. He needs to
tell congress to deliver an effective bill,
that will make the polluters pay, rather
than pay the polluters.
+ More
Can Statoil wash its
hands of the Tar Sands?
14 May 2009 - Oslo,
Norway — The largest industrial project
in the world. The largest capital investment
in history. The world’s second largest oil
field. The Canadian Tar Sands show just
how desperate the oil industry is to feed
its carbon habit. Now, thanks to a Greenpeace
campaign investors are starting to question
the wisdom paying for a project which will
destroy an area of forest the size of England,
then poison the ground and condemn the world
to runaway climate change.
The tar sands are a
source of oil buried below the Boreal Forest
of northern Alberta. The tar sands are made
up mostly of sand. Only 10-12 per cent is
bitumen – a very heavy crude oil that must
be heavily processed and refined to be turned
into synthetic crude oil. Deposits of tar
sands are spread out over 138 000 km2 of
land. The tar sands projects threaten ecosystems
over a huge area of Alberta; polluting and
depleting waterways, endangering the health
of wildlife and local communities, and contributing
to climate change.
One of the major investors
in the tar sands is Statoil, a Norweigan
oil company two thirds owned by the government.
The Norwegian government continues to support
the project, however, the owners of the
other third of Statoil, are having second
thoughts
Danske Bank has expressed
its opposition to the contentious project
while Norway’s largest bank, DnBNOR, is
holding meetings today to discuss whether
continued involvement in the Alberta tar
sands is a sound investment.
In addition, prominent Statoil stakeholders,
Folksam, a Swedish insurance company and
KPA, a Swedish pension fund, have already
sent in their votes backing a Greenpeace
motion demanding that Statoil withdraw its
investments.
Greenpeace is making
the tar sands a key issue in Norway, Sweden
and Denmark in the lead-up to Statoil’s
AGM on May 19th. As a minor shareholder,
with just enough shares to ask questions,
Greenpeace has brought forward a motion
calling on Statoil to withdraw its investments
from the tar sands.
The Alberta tar sands has dominated headlines
and television news since a Greenpeace Canada
delegation arrived in Oslo Monday. Two of
the delegates, Andrew Nikiforuk and Dr.
John O’Connor, have raised concerns about
the environmental, social and financial
risks of tar sands investments that are
reverberating through the Nordic business
community. A two-page story on the delegates
ran today in Norway’s largest business newspaper,
as well as a full-page profile on Nikiforuk.
“Hearing Canadians telling their own story
about the reality of the tar sands is making
all the difference,” said Martin Norman,
Greenpeace Nordic energy campaigner. “Already
politicians and investors are telling us
they are upset they have been so misled.”
Statoil’s purchase of tar sands rights in
Canada in 2007 led to headlines in Norway
critical of the company and internal unrest
within the company. Statoil has lately tried
to create an impression that the company
has chosen ‘In Situ’ extraction because
it is an environmentally friendly form of
extraction, and that carbon capture and
storage (CCS) will solve the emission problems
related to tar sands.
In Situ means pumping
steam into the sands to heat the bitumen
until it flows toward the wells. While this
doesn't do the same damage to the surface
as the alternative open cast mining technique,
vast amounts of natural gas are burned to
heat the steam, creating even higher CO2
emissions.
The Greenpeace delegation
has been explaining that ‘In Situ’ has a
much larger environmental footprint than
open pit mining, and that CCS is simply
not viable in the tar sands.
So far the Norweigan
government is staying put. The environment
minister has applauded the shareholder resolutions,
but refuses to intervene. The political
pressure is building though, and on the
19th of May Statoil will have the chance
to wash its hands of its role in this abhorrent
investment.
In the end, as was reported
this month in the science journal nature,
if we want to hold climate change below
two degrees, which the scientific community
says is the tipping point for runaway climate
change, we cannot afford to touch the tar
sands. It is not economic, it is not environmentally
acceptable and it places a tragic burden
on the people of the First Nations, whose
health and way of life is being destroyed
by the tar sands toxic runoff.
