Illegally logged timber seized by the Ayun villagers in Pakistan's Chitral district. A ban on trade in illegally harvested timber, wildlife and fish is omitted from the current fast-track legislation in the U.S. Congress. Credit: Imran Schah/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

A year after a U.S. company was accused of engaging in the systematic importing of flooring made from illegally harvested timber, pressure is mounting on federal agencies currently investigating the allegations.

In September 2013, federal authorities executed search warrants of two of the offices of Lumber Liquidators, the largest specialty flooring company in the United States. The company was suspected of importing illegally logged hardwood from far eastern Russia, in contravention of U.S. law.“Illegal wood can’t hide and these products can’t be laundered as easily as they have been in the past." -- Alexander von Bismarck

Around the same time, a civil society group, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), published a detailed report on the accusations, including extensive evidence suggesting that Lumber Liquidators was able to trade in this illicit hardwood through a Chinese supplier. In May, Greenpeace again questioned the company for doing business with suppliers reportedly linked to illegal logging in the Amazon.

Lumber Liquidators is currently being investigated by three U.S. agencies, and these probes are ongoing. While observers say that the complexities of such an international investigation would typically require timeframes of a year or more, in recent days green groups and others have stepped up pressure on the U.S. government to ensure accountability in the Lumber Liquidators case.

“There’s real reason to believe that Lumber Liquidators broke the law, and we’re particularly interested in this case being fully investigated and enforced,” Jesse Prentice-Dunn, with the trade programme at the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“We’ve been educating our members about U.S. law on this issue, and they have been very enthusiastic. A huge number of our members are now asking President Obama to fully enforce these laws.”

On Friday, the Sierra Club announced that more than 100,000 of its members had submitted petitions warning that “many companies will not move to make their supply chain sustainable until they see strong enforcement of the law.” Similar concerns were voiced in a letter sent last week by environment and organised labour groups to the three U.S. officials in charge of the Lumber Liquidators probes.

Meanwhile, Lumber Liquidators also took fresh action last week, announcing a new sustainability policy and website. In a release, the company noted that the new policy includes DNA testing of harvested timber, internal and external lumber audits, as well as a move towards sourcing within North America and “away from regions considered to have lower oversight”.

Yet in making the announcement, the company, which has maintained its innocence throughout the past year, outraged watchdog groups by suggesting that its past missteps had been more about communications than systemic problems.

“Admittedly, we’ve been more focused on our sustainability efforts than communicating broadly about them,” Ray Cotton, a Lumber Liquidators vice president, said in a statement unveiling the new website.

Asked by Canadian reporters whether it had ever sold wood “sourced illegally in the Russian Far East”, the company says “No,” in an official statement provided by EIA. It also claims both that the EIA investigation “contained fundamental inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims” and that the report never alleged that Lumber Liquidators had violated U.S. law.

“Lumber Liquidators’ statement is extremely disturbing,” Alexander von Bismarck, the executive director of EIA’s U.S. office, told IPS.

“Certainly that doesn’t give folks confidence in the company’s sustainability plan, if the overall focus is simply on improving communications. Rather, the first step towards substantive action would need to be taking a sober view on what has actually happened.”

In the balance

The U.S. law at the heart of the federal investigations is known as the Lacey Act, passed in 2008. It is widely seen as a pioneering piece of legislation, and one that some say is already having a global impact, including in China.

As in the allegations surrounding Lumber Liquidators, China has emerged in recent years as a major intermediary for the global wood industry, both licit and illicit. Over the past decade, Chinese exports of wood products have increased by upward of 30 percent per year.

Today, the country is the world’s largest exporter of wood products, with more than 12 percent of the global market, valued at almost 12 billion dollars in 2012. Yet that sector is also said to be one of the most opaque of any commercial market with which the United States trades.

Still, EIA’s von Bismarck says that some changes have started to take place in how the Chinese authorities are approaching the issue of illegal wood laundering. He also notes that this is what makes the Lumber Liquidators case – and the potential response by U.S. authorities, following the current investigations – so important.

While the Chinese authorities, for the first time, have started discussing illegal logging in international fora, the response has been incomplete, von Bismarck warns. This is largely because of the extent to which companies are still able to ignore laws like the Lacey Act.

“That allows Chinese industry to make the assessment that they don’t need to change their practices – because the wood is still getting in,” he says.

“So the whole situation is hanging in the balance, and the Lumber Liquidators case is a critical signal to the Chinese industry associations that are currently deciding which way they are going to go. That will decide whether, in a few years, we will have a new law of the land for the wood trade.”

While some environmentalists have started to criticise the Lacey Act, von Bismarck says the current investigation is proof that the legislation is working.

“The fact that the U.S. government is investigating a case that involves illegal logging in one country and manufacturing in another before it gets to the United States is a very positive sign for the overall efficacy of the law,” he says.

“Illegal wood can’t hide and these products can’t be laundered as easily as they have been in the past, and that could bring about a sea change in the industry. That probably hasn’t yet been digested by all corners of the global wood industry, but it will be.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Two health care workers clean their feet in a bucket of water containing bleach after they leave an Ebola isolation facility during an Ebola simulation at Biankouman Hospital in Côte d’Ivoire. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

By Marc-Andre Boisvert
KANDOPLEU/ABIDJAN, Côte d’Ivoire, Aug 26 2014 (IPS)

The nurse carefully packs the body into a plastic bag and then leaves the isolation tent, rinsing his feet in a bucket of water that contains bleach. Then he carefully takes off his safety glasses, gloves and mask and burns them in a jerry can.

Behind a cordon, hundreds of people are watching, including Ivorian Health Minister Raymonde Goudou Coffie and several local media.

They face no risks even if the deadly virus kills up to 90 percent of the infected persons: there is no Ebola outbreak in Côte d’Ivoire. And the corpse is a mannequin. This is an Ebola simulation at the district hospital in Biankouma.

“We want to test our medical teams. And see what we can do to improve our reaction,” explains the health minister, a pharmacist by training who does not hesitate to provide her in-sights.

Schoolteacher Edinie Veh Gale is in the crowd watching the exercise. “It is not translated in Yacuba, the local language. So people around do not understand. But it is good though. At least, it piqued people’s curiosity and they will search for information,” she tells IPS in French.

While the attention on the epidemic that has now been declared “out-of-control” is focused on the West African countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria, unaffected countries in the region, like Côte d’Ivoire, are struggling to understand what to do keep the disease away.

While strict epidemiological-control measures have been applied, including closing borders and banning people travelling into  Côte d’Ivoire from countries where the disease is prevalent, the current outbreak has highlighted huge gaps in prevention methods.

Especially since some citizens refuse to submit to restrictive measures.

Until now, the previous Ebola outbreaks were contained in villages in Central Africa where distance and isolation were important factors in stopping the disease.

But the current wave that resulted in over 1,135 deaths — making it the worst Ebola outbreak ever — has spread to several urban centres. In the cities restrictive measures have been met with reduced success.

Susan Shepler, an associate professor at American University and a specialist in education and conflict, is back from six weeks of research in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Despite several measures adopted by authorities, she noticed that while there have been some developments in the population’s awareness, most people in those countries have a deep mistrust for government assistance.

“It is not simply a mistrust of the state. It is a mistrust of the system. People don’t see the boundaries of the state,“ Shepler tells IPS. She explains that citizens believe politicians enter government to enrich themselves, and they therefore do not think that the state could help them.

She says that trust has yet to be built as many people, especially those who reside in opposition strongholds, see Ebola as a government plot or a religious curse.

In Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, government services and trained medical workers are barely available in regions infected by Ebola.

So when heavily-equipped medical teams, often backed by foreign experts, go to affected areas, it has been difficult for those local communities to instantly trust them.

“Western media tends to present the crisis with a focus on frontline work and chaotic scenes. But what is missing, [that needs to be] understood, is everyday life. There is a rationale for citizens’ actions,” says Shepler.

Building trust beforehand

It is difficult to discern what are good practices to fight Ebola.

Côte d’Ivoire may not have any cases, but it is uncertain if this is because the country took the right approach to the disease or if it was simply a matter of luck.

But what is clear is that Côte d’Ivoire fears being the next site of the outbreak.

Around the country, the government has multiplied preventative measures.

Last March, it banned bush meat. And since then the government has adopted several measures to contain the epidemic, including implementing screening for the disease at borders and banning direct flights to affected areas.

Now, the government has recommended that people stop hugging and shaking hands, insisting that they comply with strict hygiene rules.

The government has made also several efforts to build the trust of its people by getting local authorities and medical staff that are know to local communities involved in education campaigns.

And citizen’s initiatives are also multiplying.

In a bank in Abidjan’s commercial district, a security guard gives a shot of hand sanitiser to any client using the banking machine. “It’s for your own health,” he says.

In front of the same bank, street hawkers who help drivers park their cars refuse to shake hands.

Social media has exploded with various initiatives, notably the #MousserpourEbola (#FoamingAgainstEbola) challenge, which is used to raise money and public awareness about Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Launched by a young blogger, Edith Brou, videos of Ivorians throwing a bucket of soap water on themselves have became viral. When one is nominated for the challenge, you are required to throw a bucket of soap water on yourself and distribute three bottles of hand sanitiser. They you don’t agree to the soap shower, then you have to distribute nine bottles of hand sanitiser.

“Ivorians play down everything through humour. In spite of the funny aspect of it, the message is forwarded and listened to. There are many actions like mine. We cannot only stand by. We are responsible for our lives,” she tells IPS.

In the village of Pekanhouebli, in the west of the country and close the the Liberian border, there is no electricity and no internet access. But in this village that strongly supports the opposition, a citizen’s committee has been created to mobilise the community against Ebola.

“We did not believe that Ebola was true. We thought it was a white man’s disease from cities when authorities came to us,”senior resident Serge Tian tells IPS. “But when we heard it on the radio, we realised it was true. And we started listening to the nurse who would visit the village.”

Tian does not shake hands with IPS as we leave — it’s because he now understands a bit more about how the disease is spread. And he knows why he should comply to these restrictive measures.

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

LM Glasfiber workers hoist a wind turbine blade in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Credit: Tu/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 11 2014 (IPS)

Formal negotiations began this week around the increasingly significant global trade in “environmental goods”, those technologies seen as environmentally beneficial, including in combating climate change.

Attempts have been made to liberalise this market for years. But on Tuesday, 13 countries, constituting nearly 90 percent of the current trade in green goods such as solar panels, wind turbines and wastewater treatment filters, came together in Geneva to try again to reach agreement."There is no definition yet of what actually constitutes an ‘environmental good’, and many of the goods being considered are actually harmful to the environment.” -- Ilana Solomon

Yet there remains significant confusion around the actual potential – or even broader aim – of the talks, towards what’s being called the Environmental Goods Agreement. Green groups are expressing open scepticism of the process, taking place under the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

“From our perspective, we think increasing trade in and use of environmentally beneficial products is incredibly important. But we have really serious concerns about the approach the WTO is taking,” Ilana Solomon, the director of the Responsible Trade Program at the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“This approach is about removing tariffs on a list of products that are supposedly beneficial to the environment. But there is no definition yet of what actually constitutes an ‘environmental good’, and many of the goods being considered are actually harmful to the environment.”

The WTO talks are taking place between the United States, the European Union, China, Australia, Japan and others. Representatives are starting from a list of 54 product categories, agreed upon in 2012 among the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping.

The APEC countries are now working to reduce tariffs on these products to below five percent by 2015.

Yet the list includes many items that can be used in ways that could be either environmentally positive or negative. This includes, for instance, waste incinerators, centrifuges, gas turbines, sludge compactors and a variety of technical machinery.

The list would also seem to largely exclude poor countries. Currently, only Costa Rica has joined what are otherwise industrialised and middle-income economies in the talks.

“Poor countries are probably not producing these items,” Kim Elliott, a senior researcher on trade at the Center for Global Development, a think tank here, told IPS. “If they don’t participate in these talks they’ll likely lose out around high tariffs, but they’re probably not going to be doing much exporting.”

While proponents tend to characterise the negotiations in terms of lowering overall prices for green goods, little is said of the potential impact on nascent domestic industries.

“There might well be reasons a developing country would want to develop its own industry in, say, solar panels or wind turbines,” the Sierra Club’s Solomon says. “But having low or no tariffs could impede the ability of these countries to develop their own domestic renewable energy industries.”

Knock-on effects?

The World Trade Organisation does not include climate change in its purview. Yet since the mid-1990s the multilateral organisation says it has worked to establish “a clear link between sustainable development and disciplined trade liberalization – in order to ensure that market opening goes hand in hand with environmental and social objectives.”

Momentum behind the new talks is in part due to a push from President Barack Obama. Last year, as part of a major new focus on climate, the president announced that U.S. officials would engage in the negotiations in order “to help more countries skip past the dirty phase of development and join a global low-carbon economy.”

The administration’s interest in the issue will also be shared by other proponents of expanded free trade. Multilateral trade talks have seen little to no progress over the past two decades, after all, so proponents hope that linking these issues could give a fillip to the multilateral system.

“Everybody, at least on paper, wants to do something on climate change, so this is seen as an issue that might be able to move,” the Center for Global Development’s Elliott says. “The idea is regarded as something of a win-win, as useful for the trading system and also for the planet.”

Of course, the U.S. government’s interest is also around strengthening U.S. exports, and as political pressures have risen around the world around climate change, the trade in green goods has quickly become a major force. According to official estimates, this market’s value doubled between 2011 and 2007, and stood at around a trillion dollars last year.

The U.S. share has been growing by eight percent per year since 2009, amounting to some 106 billion dollars last year.

Certainly business interests, in the United States and industrialised countries around the world, are showing significant interest in the new talks. On Tuesday, nearly 50 major business groups and trade associations wrote to the WTO negotiators to “strongly endorse” their efforts.

The industry groups also expressed hope that an accord around environmental goods could act as a catalyst for broader liberalisation.

“An ambitious [agreement] will further increase global trade in environmental goods, lowering the cost of addressing environmental and climate challenges by removing tariffs that can be as high as 35 percent,” the groups stated.

“In addition to its intrinsic commercial importance and desirability, a well-designed [agreement] can act as a stepping stone to lowering tariffs and other trade barriers in other sectors and associated value chains.”

Backdoor liberalisation

The U.S. administration may share this view. The Sierra Club’s Solomon points to a recent letter from Michael Froman, the United States’ top trade official, requesting the U.S. International Trade Commission to research the potential impact of trade liberalisation around environmental goods.

“In the absence of a universally accepted definition of an ‘environmental good,’” Froman wrote, “I request that, for the purpose of its analysis, the Commission refer to the items contained in the list attached to this letter.”

That list, which extends to 34 pages, contains hundreds of items not currently on the APEC list. These range from natural products (honey, palm oil, urea, coconut fibres, bamboo) to the technical (pipes and casings “of a kind used in drilling for oil and gas”) to the seemingly random (vacuum cleaners, cameras).

“This appears to suggest that this exercise isn’t about protecting the environment but rather about expanding the current model of free trade – a backdoor attempt to achieve liberalisation on a broad range of goods,” Solomon says.

“As this process moves forward, we’ll need a full environmental impact assessment of everything on the list under consideration. And it can’t just be the end uses that are examined, but rather the whole lifecycle of a product’s impact that is taken into account.”

Mauritians protest against the construction of a 100-megawatt (MW) coal power plant in Pointe-aux-Caves, on the west of the island. They say the project will cause irreparable damage to them and the environment of this Indian Ocean island nation. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 7 2014 (IPS)

Landmark new policies that have sharply curtailed U.S. financing for international coal projects may be rolled back, the result of a sudden, polarised fight over a little-known government agency here.

The debate revolves around an entity called the Export-Import Bank, which for much of the past century has made federal money available to promote U.S. exports.

In December, as part of President Barack Obama’s government-wide push to enact federal policies to counter global climate change, the bank voted to significantly limit its financing of overseas coal projects, unless they put in place expensive “carbon capture” technology to store emissions underground."To even have [the Ex-Im Bank] consider this coal project is an example of them going rogue – directly flouting restrictions they never supported in the first place.” -- Justin Guay

Multiple countries and international financial institutions have subsequently followed this model to put in place their own guidelines on energy-related funding.

“When it came to direct U.S. support, that policy change ended our ability to finance new coal plants, except in rare circumstances,” Justin Guay, a Washington representative for the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“That was a historic step in curbing financing of the dirtiest and most outdated sources of energy. It was also one of the most significant pieces of progress we’ve had from this administration on fossil fuels.”

The agency did make exceptions for the poorest countries, however, allowing U.S. financing of coal projects in these countries if they use whatever is deemed the cleanest technology available. This loophole may now be significantly expanded to include many more countries, as part of a largely unrelated fight.

In recent months, conservative lawmakers here have seized on the institution, known as the Ex-Im Bank, as an example of government waste and corporate cronyism, given its role in subsidising certain U.S. businesses. The bank’s multi-year authorisation from the U.S. Congress needs to be renewed by the end of September, and in recent weeks a furious campaign has built around whether that approval should go forward.

On the chopping block may be the new coal policies, offered as a sweetener to draw back conservative lawmakers in favour of re-approving the Ex-Im Bank.

Coal compromise

Leading bipartisan compromise proposals in both the U.S. House and Senate would now see the bank’s authorisation extended for several more years but would also largely gut the coal policy, according to multiple reports.

“If we are truly committed to protecting our global environment, the U.S. should lead the world in clean coal technology and export that technology to the rest of the world,” Joe Manchin, a key lawmaker in charge of oversight for the Ex-Im Bank, said in a statement last week.

Manchin, a moderate Democrat from a coal-rich state, has reportedly proposed significantly expanding the number of poor countries that would be eligible for Ex-Im assistance around coal projects. Similar proposals are being worked on in the House of Representatives, though none of these have yet been made public.

Other lawmakers, too, have recently switched their views on the bank’s reauthorisation due to political pressures around coal. Presumably, a change on this issue could woo them to back the agency once again.

“[I]t is inappropriate to use the bank’s financing mechanisms to drive an ideological agenda rather than promote U.S. exports,” Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican in the House, said recently. “The administration’s policies come at a time when we should be ensuring the United States is leading the world in developing new coal plant technologies.”

Still, for some of the Ex-Im Bank’s most ardent critics, the attempt to link the agency’s re-authorisation to a weakening in its coal policies is not working.

“The Obama administration’s targeting of coal is absurd, but it is not important in the debate over the Export-Import Bank,” Dan Holler, communications director for Heritage Action for America, a conservative advocacy group, told IPS.

“While some lawmakers and special interest groups want to talk about coal, the real issue is whether the Bank’s charter deserves to be authorized at all. Heritage Action believes it should be allowed to expire.”

‘Rogue’ actions

The Ex-Im Bank’s new restrictions around coal would likely have a significant impact on overall U.S. support for such projects worldwide.

Of the agency’s massive budget – this year, 32 billion dollars – around a quarter consists of energy-related lending. And while assistance for coal projects has gone up and down over time, during some years the agency has offered some two billion dollars in financing for the industry.

That’s been seen by some as a misalignment of priorities: even as coal plants in the United States have been shutting down around tightened carbon regulation, the U.S. government has continued to finance more and more such projects overseas.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Ex-Im Bank’s new coal policy was controversial from the start – not only among some lawmakers but also, reportedly, among the agency’s management. Just weeks after the new requirements were voted in, lawmakers were able to pass a little-noticed legal provision that temporarily stayed the change through September.

The bank, meanwhile, has used this interlude to begin consideration of a massive and contentious coal-fired power plant in Jharkhand, in northeastern India. That development was announced at the beginning of this month.

“The Bank is in the process of conducting a full due diligence review of the financial, technical and environmental aspects of the project,” Stevan M. Horning, a spokesperson for the agency, told IPS. He confirmed that, because of the recent legal wrangling, “no analysis is being performed with respect to the … project’s compliance with” the new coal guidelines, though it will be reviewed for the agency’s pre-existing safeguards.

Horning noted that no decision would be forthcoming on the project, known as Tilaiya, until next month at the earliest.

Environmental advocates, meanwhile, say the Ex-Im Bank is operating on its own, disregarding President Obama’s climate priorities.

“President Obama pushed for this new rule over the agency’s objections, and now we’re seeing them openly defy the president’s actions,” the Sierra Club’s Guay says.

“The agency operates under the president’s administration and is part of the push to fulfil his agenda. So to even have them consider this coal project is an example of them going rogue – directly flouting restrictions they never supported in the first place.”

He continues: “The administration and Congress will have to actively rein them in.”

Mining tar sands oil at Fort McMurray. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Mar 17 2014 (IPS)

Job cuts totalling 1,000 announced at Environment Canada’s climate change division this month means there will be even fewer government scientists onboard to monitor the impact of the extraction, development and transportation of crude oil from the carbon-intensive oil sands in Alberta.

The oil sands are a major source of fossil fuel emissions which are heating areas of the planet, including the Arctic.“These audits are clearly designed to intimidate and disrupt their work." -- Dennis Howlett

Ironically, this same department, just weeks earlier, produced new research confirming that toxic chemicals from oil sands tailing ponds covering 176 square kilometres in northern Alberta are leaching into the local groundwater and seeping into the Athabasca River.

But two experts on Canadian environmental policy say they expect fewer such studies to be financed by a Conservative government in Ottawa focused on the development of the Alberta oil sands.

“This government is taking out specific forms of [research] capacity and those are the kind of things we need to have if we are ever going to tackle climate change,” said John Bennett, executive director of Sierra Club Canada.

“[With] any government that comes into power in the future, it’s going to take them two or three years to get the staff, to review what they have to do,” he told IPS.

Picking up the investigative slack but without the same amount of resources are the environmental NGOs such as the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, said Mark Winfield, a professor in the faculty of environmental studies at Toronto’s York University.

“These functions of NGOs in the public policy process have become even more important as the capacity to provide evidence-based analysis — contrary to what the current government wants to hear — continues to be diminished in Ottawa,” Winfield said in a recent blog post.

He points for instance to a report by the Pembina Institute that offers evidence of  a “significant increase” in fossil fuel emissions if a proposed west-east pipeline from Alberta to New Brunswick carrying crude oil from the oil sands is built.

Both Suzuki and Pembina are among several leading environmental organisations that have charitable status under Canadian tax regulation and thus are able to provide tax receipts for Canadians donating money for research into climate change, oil and gas development and other pollution issues.

However, since the 2011 federal election when Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative party won a parliamentary majority, these same NGOs have faced the prospect of losing their charitable status for allegedly straying past the legal 10 percent budget limit for  political activity.

The federal government’s rhetoric heated up when natural resources Minister Joe Oliver in early 2012 warned publicly of “radical” environmentalists “threaten[ing] to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” with their opposition to proposed oil pipeline projects.

Oliver stated then that these same groups rely on funding from “foreign special interest groups.”

Mark Winfield worries that CRA is raising “profound issues about the rights of Canadians,” by its actions.

The scorecards that NGOs introduce at election time to compare the positions of the various political parties on specific environmental issues including climate change may represent a crossing of the fine line between research and political advocacy, said Philippe Brideau, a spokesperson for the Canada Revenue Agency.

“In general, the CRA would likely consider a charity that rates political parties to be carrying on a partisan political activity.”

University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman is not adverse to some restrictions, although he is uncomfortable with some of the government’s rhetoric directed towards the NGOs.

“I think it is perfectly okay to publish data. But I am not sure it is proper to get tax money and get up and say ‘the Conservatives are killing the environment,’” he told IPS.

At the same time, Wiseman said he is not sure that Canadian organisations taking foreign money is necessarily illegal or even a bad thing.

“If there is some group that arises and wants to build democracy in the Ukraine, we want to give them some money. It could be illegal according to Ukrainian law. I suspect it is not illegal here.”

Recently revealed internal documents indicate that the Canada Revenue Agency is investing 12 million dollars (U.S.), more than then the 7.2 million previously announced, in an ongoing multi-year audit until 2017 of environmental NGOs with legal charity status.

CBC TV recently reported that CRA is investigating the following environmental charities — David Suzuki Foundation, Tides Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, The Pembina Foundation, Environmental Defence, Equiterre and the Ecology Action Centre — for possibly exceeding the allowable 10 percent for political activity.

John Bennett at the Sierra Club, which is not being currently audited, said the political restrictions were never an issue for the NGOs until the Harper government came along and unleashed the CRA.

“There are things that groups have been doing for years and years and are now being told those are not qualified activities,” he explained.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has made vague allegations about ties between NGOs and organised crime. Credit: Joey Coleman/cc by 2.0

Environmental NGOs, for instance, have historically worked with corporations within an industry like forestry to establish a sector-based code of conduct that respects the land, water, flora and fauna during any resource extraction activity.

Now, under a “retroactive” interpretation of political activity for charities by the CRA, that kind of consultation is being disallowed, said Bennett.

“This is the kind of activity which we thought was very positive, so trying to say that we can’t do that anymore is a way to get us out of the business of being an influence for change in society,” he said.

Philippe Brideau at the CRA counters that the issue of a code of conduct is not as clear-cut with regards to consultation.  “It depends on whether the actual activity fits the definition of political activity,” he said.

But Dennis Howlett, executive director for Canadians for Tax Fairness, argues that the Harper government is using the CRA to conduct a political “witch-hunt,” against NGOs daring to criticise public policy.

He notes that a similar form of “intimidation” of ongoing auditing is also occurring with organisations focused on international development.

“These audits are clearly designed to intimidate and disrupt their work, so instead of going in and auditing and saying, ‘no everything’s fine,’ they keep the audit open, and they don’t conclude the audit. They don’t come to any resolution; they just keep the charities hanging… I know of audits that have been going on for a year.”

Furthermore, Howlett points to the reported staff cuts at the Canada Revenue Agency over a three-year period totaling close to 3,000, plus another approximately 100 jobs lost in the units assigned to investigate overseas tax evasion and aggressive tax planning, and finally the disbanding of a special unit devoted to organised crime.

“These would be the more experienced trained auditors, forensic accountants, people with a fair high level of education and training and experience,” Howlett told IPS.

“CRA has lost a lot of key staff and their ability to investigate both individuals using tax havens to hide their money, as well as corporations who are shifting profit through tax havens to reduce their product and their tax bill.”

Brideau counters that the CRA “takes its commitment to detecting and addressing non-compliance with Canada’s tax laws seriously.” He denies that any auditors have been cut in his department.

“Reductions in staff are limited to individuals performing programme or corporate support functions,” he told IPS.

Advocates say that public opinion, both domestically and internationally, is already in the midst of broad changes regarding dirtier forms of energy production. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 14 2014 (IPS)

Environmentalists and some lawmakers are decrying a surprise move by conservative members of Congress to roll back landmark “clean energy” policies guiding U.S. investments in overseas power projects.

Two federal agencies have new guidance in place largely barring government investment in power-generation projects that fail to adequately cut carbon emissions. The rules, by the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which facilitate U.S. private investments into foreign projects, would essentially discontinue U.S. funding for overseas coal-fired power generation."Industry and the politicians that represent them are panicking." -- Janet Redman

Yet a surprise addendum to a massive U.S. government spending bill would disallow the Export-Import Bank from implementing its new rule, which was unveiled in December. The provision, made public Monday evening, also guts a court-ordered greenhouse gas cap put in place in 2009 to force OPIC to set limits on the carbon emissions of its investments.

“In our view, this is a direct attack on one of the key achievements of the president’s Climate Action Plan,” Justin Guay, a Washington representative for the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“This was the coal industry striking back symbolically at what it saw as a very serious set of political headwinds, as the overseas markets represent their lone opportunity to remain a relevant industry.”

According to media reports, the new provision was offered by Hal Rogers, the top Republican lawmaker in charge of crafting the massive appropriations bill, which allocates funding for nearly all parts of the federal government. On Tuesday, Rogers touted the passage of “A provision to prohibit the Export-Import Bank and OPIC from blocking coal and other power-generation projects, which will increase exports of U.S. goods or services.”

Rogers is a representative from the state of Kentucky, where the coal industry has traditionally been particularly strong.

An OPIC spokesperson told IPS that, for fiscal year 2014, the new legislation “permits OPIC to consider power projects in poor countries that would otherwise be subject to its [greenhouse gas] portfolio reduction goals, while preserving other pre-existing environmental, labour, human rights and credit criteria.”

Ex-Im model

The second half of last year saw a flurry of high-level activity on environment issues here, following a major climate-related speech given by President Barack Obama. One element of this was the administration’s move to severely curtail U.S. funding streams, both public and private, for coal projects abroad.

Following on new regulatory proposals for future power plants here, the Export-Import Bank in December announced that it would only finance overseas power projects if they put in place “carbon capture and sequestration” technologies, to store emissions underground.

“The Export-Import Bank was the world’s first export credit agency to have announced restrictions of this type,” Guay says.

“They really went out on a limb to put these guidelines in place, but then also worked with governments around the world to replicate those policies. The subsequent successes we’ve seen are almost entirely due to the leadership and pressure from the Obama administration.”

Seven countries and four international financial institutions have now passed some form of the Export-Import Bank’s guidelines on energy-related funding. Guay says this is seen as an important success for the Obama administration – and an indication that the president is taking on stronger international leadership on the issue.

For now, however, this victory appears to have been snatched away. While U.S. legislative proposals are typically open to debate and changes, the new appropriations bill will likely not see such a process.

The bill not only covers a huge swath of issues, but is also seen as an important – and uncommon – result of negotiations between the two political parties. On Tuesday, the White House indicated that it supported passage of the bill in its current form.

Yet nearly all lawmakers over the past day have noted that there is much to dislike in the proposal, with some specifically highlighting the new OPIC and Export-Import provisions.

“There are also some things I wish were not in here, particularly a House provision that would weaken limits on carbon emissions from projects financed by the Export-Import Bank and Overseas Private Investment Corporation,” Senator Patrick Leahy said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. “We should be using public funds to support exports of clean, renewable technology, not to fund power projects that worsen global warming.”

Altruistic appearances

Still, advocates say that public opinion, both domestically and internationally, is already in the midst of broad changes regarding dirtier forms of energy production. This is particularly the case with coal, which many analysts see as a dying industry in the United States.

“In a sense, industry and the politicians that represent them are panicking,” Janet Redman, director of the Climate Policy Programme at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS. “Because of this, we’ve seen an overall attack on the ongoing shift away from fossil fuel. Part of this is industry players pushing new ideas like ‘clean coal’ or natural gas as a ‘bridge’ fuel.”

Redman draws a link between these new, ostensibly more progressive, campaigns and a tactic she says is part of the push against the OPIC and Export-Import guidelines.

“We’re seeing some folks say that the idea here is about development goals and reducing poverty,” Redman says. “But I’m concerned that fossil fuels interests are hiding behind what looks like an altruistic motive as a way to build up the industry.”

In mid-December, two Republican lawmakers, including another representative from Kentucky, decried the restrictive new U.S. policies on overseas energy investment.

“The actions raise questions … [about] the practical impact of U.S. international humanitarian goals, trade policies, and foreign commerce,” the lawmakers, Fred Upton and Ed Whitfield, stated in a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew.

“Requiring [carbon capture and sequestration] would constitute a de facto ban on construction of state-of-the-art new coal-fired power plants – projects that some of the countries in greatest need of reliable and affordable electricity seek today.”

Such warnings notwithstanding, the Sierra Club’s Guay says the new provisions appear to have caught by surprise many proponents of cleaner overseas energy investments.

“We weren’t expecting such a problematic set of language around these provisions – it seems to have been kind of snuck in during the dead of the night,” he says.

“The [Obama] administration is not going to be happy. But one silver lining could be that this attack will have woken up both the administration and the activist community to how important this [provision] was and how much defence it will require going forward.”

Nuclear energy provides around a fifth of U.S. electricity demand. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 2013 (IPS)

Four prominent climate and energy scientists are calling on environmentalists to rethink their longstanding opposition to nuclear energy, warning that there is no “credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power”.

The warning comes just ahead of a new round of international climate negotiations, slated to start next week in Poland, aimed at arriving at an international consensus on action to mitigate climate change beyond 2015. Yet observers are increasingly pessimistic that this process will be able to keep the planet’s average temperature rise below two degree Celsius by the end of this century, the current stated goal."Solar and wind technologies have none of those risks and their costs are quickly coming down." -- Steve Clemmer of UCS

The new call comes in the form of a letter sent over the weekend to world leaders, prominent environmentalists and green organisations. Most prominently, it was signed by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist who for decades has written of the dangers posed by climate change; today, he is perhaps the single most recognisable researcher speaking on the issue in the United States.

Also signing on to the call, addressed to “those influencing environmental policy but opposed to nuclear energy”, are two additional U.S. scientists, Ken Caldeira and Kerry Emanuel, and one from Australia, Tom Wigley. Each are associated with major research institutions.

“We appreciate your organization’s concern about global warming, and your advocacy of renewable energy. But continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change,” the four state.

“With the planet warming and carbon dioxide emissions rising faster than ever, we cannot afford to turn away from any technology that has the potential to displace a large fraction of our carbon emissions. Much has changed since the 1970s. The time has come for a fresh approach to nuclear power in the 21st century.”

Currently, nuclear energy provides around a fifth of U.S. electricity demand. Globally, that figure is slightly lower, with 30 countries hosting nuclear reactors that provided around 12 percent of worldwide electricity production, as of 2011.

As of July, around 434 reactors were operating globally, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a U.S. lobby group. In addition, 71 new plants were under construction, including two here in the United States.

In their letter, the four scientists say that while they support renewable forms of electricity production, these methods appear unable to deal with the quickly ramping-up global demands for energy. They also suggest that new nuclear plant designs are cheaper and “much safer” than older reactors, while new incineration methods can “solve the waste disposal problem”.

The letter has been embraced by the nuclear industry, which many analysts suggest has been stagnating for years over environmental and safety concerns.

“The letter puts an exclamation point on a phenomenon that has been unfolding for several years, namely the steady growth in support for nuclear energy from leading environmentalists,” Marv Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, told IPS in a statement.

“Greenhouse gas emissions would be vastly higher if nuclear energy facilities did not provide 40 percent of the electricity globally that is produced by carbon-free sources of power (63 percent in the United States) … There is ever-increasing recognition of this analysis.”

Expensive, slow, risky

In fact, the number of environmentalists who have publicly begun advocating for nuclear power in the face of climate change remains quite low, though James Hansen will now be a notable addition.

Among environmentalists, initial reactions to the letter have been adamant, if respectful, rejection.

“[We] respect these scientists, and thank them for their years of service. Unfortunately, we will have to agree to disagree with them on this one,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“While we agree that the climate crisis is the most urgent challenge of our time, this group fails to acknowledge that wind, solar and [energy] efficiency are the faster, cheaper and safer way to fight the climate threat.”

Brune says nuclear plants are “too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky”, while noting that Germany, one of the world’s largest economies, is currently decommissioning its nuclear plants while focusing significant funding on renewable energy sources.

Indeed, green groups have been increasingly trumpeting the falling costs of renewables, with wind energy falling by around 43 percent over the past three years, and solar down by 80 percent. The economics of nuclear, on the other hand, have become even more complicated in recent years, with several U.S. plants shutting down over feasibility concerns.

Further many renewable technologies are currently ready to be put into action, compared to the decade it can take to build a new nuclear plant. A major report released last year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a U.S. research group, found that currently available renewable technologies could provide 80 percent of U.S. demand by 2050.

And while, in their letter, Hansen and the other scientists allude to new technologies that would make the nuclear option cheaper and safer, most such methods have yet to be demonstrated.

“There certainly are proposed technologies that proponents say would address many of these concerns, but they don’t have a proven track record, and have yet to be deployed on a large scale,” Steve Clemmer, director of energy research for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“It would have been nice to know exactly what this letter is referring to, as they don’t actually back up these claims. If they’re going to convince environmental groups, they’re going to need to offer some good technical information.”

While UCS has focused for years on issues of nuclear safety and price (a recent analysis on a U.S. plant under construction can be found here), the group doesn’t reject the prospect of nuclear energy entirely.

“Because the climate issue is so large and the need to reduce emissions is so big and urgent, we certainly don’t want to take nuclear power off the table as a potential solution to climate change,” Clemmer says.

The United States alone, for instance, will likely have to reduce its emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050.

“As such, we’re definitely supportive of things like research and development of nuclear and other technologies that can reduce carbon emissions, and we want to make sure we have as many options at our disposal,” Clemmer continues.

“But where we are today is a different story. We’re not in a position to allow for large-scale deployment of nuclear power, due to concerns over security, proliferation, safety, waste disposal. Meanwhile, solar and wind technologies have none of those risks and their costs are quickly coming down.”

Relatively cleaner-burning natural gas continues to be seen as an important “bridge” fuel for the foreseeable future. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

A debate is heating up here over the extent to which U.S. government-facilitated private-sector development investments should be required to take into account how those ventures impact on climate change.

The discussions focus on a small and relatively little-known federal agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the government office in charge of mobilising private capital in pursuit of international development priorities. While OPIC generally receives high marks, in recent years some groups have been particularly impressed by the agency’s focus on investments in small-scale, de-centralised renewable energy projects."The world has completely changed, and we already have cheap, nimble, profitable micro-grids specifically serving poor populations." -- Justin Guay of the Sierra Club

“Outside of USAID” – the government’s main foreign aid arm – “OPIC is investing pretty much the only U.S. [government] money specifically for off-grid clean energy that directly supports clean energy access for the poor,” Justin Guay, a Washington representative for the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“Any energy investment today by most agencies is about ‘energy access’, but this is disingenuous because that energy goes into the grid and the vast majority is then consumed by the rich and by large companies. Without associated infrastructure to rural areas or to make energy affordable for the poor, most of these investments are just increasing the general supply.”

OPIC’s mandate is set to run out soon, and Congress is currently tasked with figuring out the details of its re-authorisation. The Sierra Club and some other groups are warning that new legislation could undermine the agency’s unique coupling of climate-related and anti-poverty aims.

Capping the cap

Since its establishment in the early 1970s, OPIC has mobilised and insured some 400 billion dollars in investments in more than 4,000 projects in 150 countries. The agency says its renewable portfolio today stands at around one billion dollars.

Last week, OPIC and 14 other development institutions agreed for the first time to “substantially scale up” their green investments in developing countries, with the aim of collecting 100 billion dollars a year for the effort by 2020.

“The challenges of transitioning to a green economy are far outweighed by benefits of job creation, innovation and poverty alleviation,” Elizabeth Littlefield, OPIC’s president, said following the meeting.

In addition to Littlefield’s reported personal commitment to these issues, OPIC’s focus on investment in green energy was motivated by a 2009 court decision that forced the agency to pay attention to the carbon emissions of its investments. The result was a binding policy to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its projects by 30 percent by 2018 and by 50 percent by 2023.

It is this emissions “cap” that is now the focus of debate in the U.S. Congress. While some are demanding that the regulation be maintained or even extended to other agencies, others are urging that it be tweaked or done away with entirely.

Some among this latter group represent oil-and-gas interests with a clear business stake in weakening the emissions cap. Yet a more nuanced view is also being offered by development scholars and advocacy groups worried about an imbalance between long-term international aims and immediate human development issues.

“There’s broad recognition that to really have a transformative impact and to reach billions of people there’s going to need to be a mix of renewables and non-renewables, but for some countries natural gas is a more viable model to provide access to citizens and unleash private business activity,” Ben Leo, a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“My sincere hope is that a compromise can be found amongst environmental and development groups. One could imagine, for instance, a very limited exception to the OPIC greenhouse gas cap for a small subset of countries – those that are very poor and very low emitters of carbon dioxide. Niger, for instance, has basically zero emissions.”

Access vs resilience

Much of the impetus for the current discussion around the greenhouse gas cap is centred on energy access in Africa. In part this is due to President Barack Obama’s new Power Africa initiative, proposed during his trip to the continent in June, which aims to double energy access in sub-Saharan countries through a mix of public and private investment.

As part of the proposal, OPIC would commit around 1.5 billion dollars in energy project funding and insurance, which recent experience would suggest would be largely earmarked for renewable and decentralised projects.

As part of a related bill currently pending in the House of Representatives, however, Congress would require that OPIC issue new guidance that could weaken the emissions cap. Similar talks are now taking place in the Senate. (OPIC was unable to offer comment on these legislative proposals by deadline.)

“We’re concerned that there are some folks who think we need to loosen the cap in order to make room for natural gas and fossil fuels, because those energy sources are cheap,” Janet Redman, director of the Climate Policy Programme at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“But the role of development finance institutions is to take into account both pieces of the formula – we can’t look at energy decisions without looking at their impacts. Similarly, it’s worth examining who would really benefit from lifting this cap – local communities or the companies that would be investing in massive natural gas infrastructure?”

Multilateral funders have increasingly run up against the tension between energy access and climate concerns. The past year has seen increasing movement away from certain very dirty forms of energy – both the World Bank and the United States, for instance, largely banned the overseas funding of new coal-fired power plants.

Nonetheless, relatively cleaner-burning natural gas continues to be seen as an important “bridge” fuel for the foreseeable future, in part because U.S. supplies have made it both plentiful and cheap.

Those now advocating for OPIC’s greenhouse gas cap note that other foreign aid funders – including within the U.S. government – will continue to focus on non-renewable energy investments. But they also view the resilience of green, decentralised energy production to be an important anti-poverty goal in and of itself.

“To a great extent our stance is not really based on climate concerns – this is just the right tool for the job,” Sierra Club’s Guay says.

“The debate is centred on an outmoded debate on clean energy, that it’s expensive. But the world has completely changed, and we already have cheap, nimble, profitable micro-grids specifically serving poor populations. It would be a tragedy if this debate gets focused through a prism that’s decades old.”

Advocates say the official social cost of carbon (SCC) has a significant impact on the cost-benefit rationale for strengthened carbon-related regulation. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 17 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced it is accepting a petition from a conservative advocacy group critical of a recent substantial increase to official calculations of the so-called “social cost of carbon”.

Since 2010, Washington officials have estimated that the damages resulting from the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere could be quantified at around 22 dollars per tonne, representing the net impact of both pollution and climate change on human health and safety, agriculture, the environment, energy costs, etc.“The irony of their complaints is that the current figures for the social cost of carbon are likely far too low." -- Jamie Henn of 350.org

But following on a little-publicised inter-agency review, in June the government began to use a new figure, 36 dollars per pound, an increase of some 60 percent.

According to government officials, that’s in line with similar figures being used by some European countries. Advocates say the official social cost of carbon (SCC) has a significant impact on the cost-benefit rationale for strengthened carbon-related regulation.

“The social cost of carbon is a powerful metric to help make the risks of climate change more tangible – it’s the difference between saying, ‘cigarettes are probably unhealthy for you’ and ‘cigarettes cause cancer’,” Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“As people start to make the direct link between carbon emissions and the problems in their communities, from high asthma rates to extreme weather, they’re going to start to demand more action.”

SCC figures can also be used to put a specific “social harm” price tag on the emissions of particular companies or facilities. Henn notes that the oil giant ExxonMobil, for instance, estimates that it put out around 125 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year – potentially costing society some 4.5 billion dollars a year, according to the new SCC number.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama has promised wide-ranging regulatory action during his second term in office to counter the ongoing lack of climate-related legislation coming from the U.S. Congress. That prospect has led to a significant ramping up in lobbying efforts in recent months by the oil-and-gas sector and powerful U.S. business interests.

A quiet revision

At the heart of the pushback against the SCC revision is the fact that, unusually, the change was made with almost no publicity. Instead, President Obama’s administration simply integrated the new number into an obscure report on new energy efficiency requirements for microwave ovens – requirements that were to go into effect on Friday.

Since June, however, critics of government action on carbon pollution and climate change have seized on the issue, attempting to force the administration to backtrack on the new rule. On Friday, the Energy Department accepted a petition filed by the Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative legal advocacy group based, accusing the government of a lack of transparency in the process.

The Department of Energy’s “unannounced, dramatically increased, and improperly altered [SCC] valuation presented for the first time in this microwave oven regulation will certainly become the standard by which all other agencies will place a purportedly beneficial economic value on new carbon regulations,” the foundation states.

“Landmark objects to the Department’s … decision to utilize an ‘Interagency Update’ to justify increasing the ‘social cost’ of carbon dioxide without any opportunity for public comment.”

On Friday, the Department of Energy publicly announced that it would be opening Landmark’s petition to public comment for 30 days (the announcement also includes a copy of the petition). Neither the department nor Landmark responded to IPS’s request for comment.

“It’s no wonder that the fossil fuel industry and their allies are so worried about the calculations,” 350.org’s Henn says.

“The irony of their complaints is that the current figures for the social cost of carbon are likely far too low. Scientists are making it increasingly clear that we’re approaching dangerous climate tipping points, beyond which the damage to our planet and society are incalculable. In the end, it’s hard to put a price tag on a liveable planet.”

Indeed, some scientists have suggested far higher ranges for SCC figures, from 55 to as high as 900 dollars a ton. The U.S. government itself estimates that the official SCC figure will rise to more than 70 dollars a ton by 2050.

War on SCC

The new SCC figures have also caught the attention of lawmakers, bolstered by support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby group.

In mid-July, an Obama administration official was summoned to testify before a Congressional oversight committee on the issue. When lawmakers complained about the lack of legislative or public input, the official, Howard Shelanski, noted that the inter-agency revisions were based on three publicly created, peer-reviewed computer models.

“It is important to note that the only changes made in May 2013 to the SCC estimates reflect the refinements made to the underlying models,” Shelanski stated in testimony. “In other words, all of the changes to the social cost of carbon values were the result of updates to … models that were made by the model developers themselves.”

He also stated that the SCC has been referenced in all energy efficiency rulemaking in recent years, and hence has been open to public input since at least 2010. Indeed, the government has been trying to evaluate the financial impact of pollution for far longer, with little partisan pushback.

“We’ve actually been on the books using cost-benefit analysis, evaluating the costs of pollution, for a very long time – the [1963] Clean Air Act requires us to do that, but this analysis has become more robust since that time,” Elizabeth Perera, a senior Washington representative for the Sierra Club, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“And let’s remember, this is a very market-based approach, a very bipartisan approach to dealing with pollution.”

Republican lawmakers were dissatisfied with Shelanski’s rebuttal, however. In early August, the House of Representatives voted to disallow another key regulatory agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), from using any SCC value in its energy regulations without specific Congressional approval.

The bill has little chance of becoming law, but represents only one piece of a broader push by the right against SCC implementation. Some lawmakers worry that a currently pending EPA regulation could result in a significant scaling back of the use of coal in the United States.

“The EPA’s policies have real-world consequences,” the SCC amendment’s sponsor, Representative Tim Murphy, said following its passage. “We’ve already seen what the ‘social cost’ of the War on Coal is today – the cost is jobs.”

Critics of a potential free trade agreement between the United States and European Union worry that such an agreement could lead to increased exportation of liquified natural gas from the U.S. Credit: Bigstock

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Controversy is building following the announcement that negotiations will soon begin on a free trade agreement between the United States and European Union, with critics warning that any such agreement could negatively affect a host of regulatory concerns.

On Monday, during the Group of Eight (G8) summit held in Northern Ireland, the United States, European Commission and European Council jointly announced that negotiations will begin on Jul. 8 in Washington for what British Prime Minister David Cameron called “the biggest bilateral trade deal in history”.

Proponents characterise the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), also known as the Trans-Atlantic Free Agreement (TAFTA), as a way to improve the struggling economies of the United States and European Union.

“The whole point,” Cameron stated on Monday, “is to fire up our economies and drive growth and prosperity around the world – to do things that make a real difference to people’s lives. And there is no more powerful way to achieve that than by boosting trade.”

He asserted that the deal could “add as much as a 100 billion pounds to the EU economy, 80 billion pounds to the U.S. economy, and as much as 85 billion pounds to the rest of the world”.

Nevertheless, there is significant opposition to the proposed deal.

“The claims that this deal will somehow be an economic cure-all and generate significant growth are simply not supported by any reliable evidence,” Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen‘s Global Trade Watch, a public interest watchdog group based in Washington, said Tuesday.

“But we do know that the talks are based on the demands of U.S. and EU corporations that have been pushing for decades to eliminate the best consumer, environmental and financial standards on either side of the Atlantic.”"The claims that this deal will somehow be an economic cure-all and generate significant growth are simply not supported by any reliable evidence."
-- Lori Wallach

Tariffs between the U.S. and E.U. are already low, and critics note that that what the deal really seeks to accomplish is the removal of “non tariff barriers” (also referred to as “trade irritants”).

“Non-tariff barriers is a commonly-used euphemism which refers to the array of financial, environmental, health and other policies which the public has put in place to safeguard its own interests,” Ben Beachy, a research director for Public Citizen, told IPS.

Under T-TIP, standards such as those mentioned by Beachy would be “converged”, so that regulations from state to state would be more closely aligned. Supporters of the deal say this uniformity would facilitate trade, but Beachy contended that the greater effect would be to lower regulation levels to a point that “democratic electorates would never stand for.”

“The resulting effect of ‘convergence'”, he said, “will be to limit the ability of democratic policymakers to establish their own preferred levels of regulation.”

Chilling effect

Environment groups are likewise worried that such harmonisation will allow for an increase in certain energy technologies, particularly the sudden prevalence in the United States of natural gas hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”.

Countries of the European Union currently restrict fracking within their own borders due to environmental concerns. But some analysts suggest these countries would be less averse to consuming imported gas fracked in the United States.

“There are concerns that the U.S. would become a major exporter of liquefied natural gas to the E.U.,” Ilana Solomon, of the Sierra Club, an environmental protection group, told IPS.

The United States recently approved private licenses for companies seeking to liquefy gas, indicating that in the future it will export liquefied natural gas, something it does not currently do.

Under free trade agreements in the past, Solomon noted, important regulatory reviews normally undertaken when considering the advantages of exportation have often been replaced by automatic approvals.

There are also health concerns related to the agreement. Some worry that food safety standards in the United States, for example, could be compromised if European exporters –  currently subject to lower standards – could deliver their, say, milk to U.S. stores.

Regardless of where U.S. standards stood, the less-well-regulated (and possibly less expensive) European milk would be available to U.S. consumers.

Another controversial aspect of the agreement would allow European privately owned corporations to challenge U.S. domestic laws that may negatively affect their profits or even expected profits.

In what are known as “investor-state” tribunals, foreign corporations would be eligible to receive compensation from taxpayers if the corporations could demonstrate that they lost money because of laws that inhibit trade.

Being subject to these tribunals could lead to what Public Citizen’s Beachy refers to as a “chilling effect”, meaning policymakers would be less likely to pass regulations because of perceived vulnerability.

Chipping away regulation

Beachy also noted the deal could carry “very real economic costs” if it undermines financial regulations and increases the risk of economic crisis.

According to a European Commission study, regulations that may be subject to “convergence” include financial safeguards such as those included in policies enacted by the United States following the economic crisis that began in 2008.

Last year, the Association of German Banks indicated what it hoped would emerge from any transatlantic deal regarding the aligning of U.S. and European standards.

“We would not like to see U.S. regulators applying standards to our banks that are extraterritorial, duplicative or discriminating … we have a number of such concerns regarding the ongoing implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act,” said the Association, referring to the most significant U.S. regulatory legislation passed in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

According to Beachy, it is doubtful that the free trade agreement could succeed in removing all its targeted “irritants”.

The European Commission study confirmed that this would be “unlikely”, noting that to do so in some cases would require “constitutional changes” and that “political sensitivities” might stand in the way.

Still, opponents worry that by specifically targeting these barriers, the broad agreement could succeed in chipping away at a significant number of them.

“The corporations that favour the agreement know they won’t get everything they want,” Beachy said. “But they think they can get a lot.”

Michael Brune. Courtesy of Sierra Club.

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 15 2013 (IPS)

The term “civil disobedience” takes its roots from an 1849 essay by U.S. poet, philosopher and environmentalist, Henry David Thoreau, originally entitled “Resistance to Civil Government”.

Civil disobedience is often used as a non-violent tool of protest against widespread injustices, such as in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

On the morning of Feb. 13, prominent activists gathered in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and participated in an act of civil disobedience, to protest the idea behind the Keystone XL Pipeline.

This pipeline would run from Alberta, Canada all the way across the United States, to its coastline in the Gulf of Mexico. It would carry about a million barrels of crude oil each day, and according to protestors and scientists, contribute dangerously to climate change.There are at least three times more jobs that come from solar and wind than for an equivalent amount of gas or coal or oil.

The protestors – who include NASA climate scientist James Hansen, poet Bob Haas and lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among others – were arrested after blocking a main thoroughfare in front of the White House and refusing to move.

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, was among the participants in this event. It was his organisation’s first act of civil disobedience in its 120-year old history, and the first time its executive director was arrested.

Brune spoke with IPS correspondent George Gao about his experience at the protest, as well as the environmental significance of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Can you describe what unfolded on the morning of Feb. 13 outside of the White House?

A: We organised about 50 community leaders from across the country who have been resisting various aspects of both the tar sands and other destructive projects in civil disobedience outside of the White House.

The point of this was to call on President (Barack) Obama to make sure that he’s doing everything within his power to turn away from extreme energy sources, and to embrace clean energy as much as he can.

Q: What specifically makes the tar sands’ oil deposits in Alberta, Canada – and the Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport these deposits – unique and deserved of such attention, as compared to other pipelines?

A: The tar sands is the most carbon intensive fuel source on the planet. It’s hard to access and takes a lot of energy to extract this thick gooey oil out of the ground. So we are deeply concerned that by expanding production of the tar sands, it will make it almost impossible to stop runaway climate change.

We have been advocating that instead of building a massive pipeline that would take almost a million barrels of oil per day, from Canada down into the U.S., that we should investing that same money, seven billion dollars worth, in clean energy instead – solar, and wind and energy efficiency and advanced energy technologies.

So we were fighting this both because the pipeline itself was highly destructive, but also because it’s a symbol of the kind of investments that we need to turn away from as a society.

Q: Proponents of the pipeline argue that this will create easy jobs for a slumping economy – ready jobs that the U.S. know how to allocate. Is this a misperception?

A: We have to be honest in this debate: there are jobs in installing a pipeline, and for many people those are important jobs. Any energy investments create jobs. If you create a coal plant, that will put people to work, if you create a pipeline, that will put other people to work.

But if we’re going to be honest about that, we should also be honest about the big picture, which is that we can produce more jobs – we have produced more jobs in clean energy than with dirty fuels.

There are at least three times more jobs that come from solar and wind than for an equivalent amount of gas or coal or oil. So if we care about climate change, of course you want to move to clean energy. If you care about the economy and producing jobs, you should probably move to clean energy as well.

The folks who are the most defensive and resistant towards a clean energy transition are the ones who are profiting from our dependence on fossil fuels.

Q: Does the pipeline run through any environmentally sensitive areas or protected lands in the United States?

A: It runs through Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska, which is one of the most important drinking water supplies in the country. It also runs through people’s farms and ranches, many of whom have been farming and ranching in those areas for generations.

I was next to a couple of ranchers yesterday from Nebraska. They don’t want any part of a dirty oil pipeline running through their farm. They don’t feel as though companies like TransCanada and others have any right to take their property, risk their water supply – all for a substance that will pollute our air and pollute our atmosphere.

Q: What executive powers does U.S. President Barack Obama wield over this situation?

A: An enormous amount. The president can reject this pipeline outright. The State Department is currently reviewing the proposal, will issue a recommendation – or what’s known as a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement – and then it is the president’s decision about whether the pipeline should be built or not.

One person gets to decide. That’s why we were out in front of the White House.

Q: Do you see this decision as a significant moment that sets the tone for future climate change policies in the U.S.?

A: Absolutely. We’re having the largest rally in U.S. history on climate change in the National Mall this Sunday, and it’s coming at a time where there are several important decisions that the president will make: about mountain top removal, about fracking across the country, about drilling in the arctic, whether or not to build a deadly and destructive pipeline.

What we’re seeing is a resurgence of committed, passionate Americans who are willing to advocate and fight for clean energy, and it’s really inspiring to be a part of.

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