Breathing new life into fossils: ECAs play critical role in pushing obsolete technology on developing nations.
Developed nations have seen the "writing on the wall" when it
comes to polluting coal-fired and nuclear power generation. The
health and environmental risks of using these technologies are so
onerous that the United Kingdom, for example, hasn't built a
coal-fired power plant since 1972.
Yet through its national export credit agency, the Export Credit
Guarantee Department (ECGD), the UK Government has funded exports
of fossil fuel-burning and nuclear power generation projects worth
an average of 1.76 billion pounds stirling every year over the last
decade. Like other ECAs, the ECGD is a government agency that helps
private corporations engage in business activities abroad by
underwriting projects, effectively insuring them. The ECGD is the
subject of a new Greenpeace report.
This objectionable trade exposes the people of developing
countries to the unnecessary health and pollution risks of these
obsolete technologies. Furthermore, the above-mentioned ECGD
projects alone mean one billion tonnes of the greenhouse gas carbon
dioxide will be added to the atmosphere over the next twenty years,
contributing to climate change.
Unfortunately, poor choices made now will adversely affect the
energy pathways of these countries for the next 30 to 40 years. For
example, since 1992 the ECGD has provided 193 guarantees of support
to 140 fossil fuel and nuclear generation projects and fossil fuel
extraction projects in 38 different countries, including India,
China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South
Africa, Zimbabwe, and Turkey.
This is unacceptable, especially since governments agreed at the
2001 Marrakech climate change summit (COP 7) that ECAs must play a
part to ensure the transfer of clean, renewable energy
technologies. Yet as of June 2002 the UK's ECGD had provided
precisely zero assistance to renewable energy projects in the
previous three years, an abysmal record.
This role as a pusher of dirty technologies makes the UK a
hypocrite in its attitude toward the Kyoto Protocol on climate
change. Even if the UK fully meets their Kyoto commitments to
reduce climate-changing gases, half of these gains will be
cancelled by those emissions that are "directly attributable" to
the ECGD.
ECAs must move quickly to reform themselves to actively support
the transfer of renewable energy technologies to the developing
world, and phase out their support for dirty energy
investments.
View the report