Resources: Energy

85 results
Larry Lohmann

4 February 2024

The colonialism inside today’s practices of energy transition becomes evident both from experiences of close listening to participants in grassroots struggles over extractivism and livelihood and from an engaged examination of the histories of energy and transition. In turn, greater awareness of the colonial nature of energy transition can fruitfully feed into movement-building around climate change.

Insights from Artificial Intelligence
Larry Lohmann

7 August 2023

Court Judgment on European Oil Companies Found to be Incompatible with OECD Anti-Corruption Convention
HEDA (Nigeria), Re:Common (Italy) and The Corner House

20 October 2022

Italy's recent acquittal of oil multinationals Shell and ENI for bribery in Nigeria has been severely criticised by the body that acts as guardian of one of the main international anti-bribery conventions.  Details of this important case can be found in the attached press release.

A submission on the case co-authored by HEDA, a Nigerian human rights and anti-corruption group; Re:Common, an Italian non-governmental organization and The Corner House is also available above.

An Exchange
Simon Pirani, Larry Lohmann and David Schwartzman

17 February 2022

A pamphlet issued by People and Nature (www.peoplenature.org) brings together contributions from three authors to a recent forum on the role of fossil fuels and the meaning of "energy" in capitalist society. The discussion emphasizes the importance of analyzing commodities, commons, class, history and physics when talking about transitions away from fossil fuels and from capitalism.

Larry Lohmann

1 February 2022

The new, “green” state/corporate system that was heralded by capitalist visionaries in the early 2020s (including Larry Fink of BlackRock, Mark Carney of the United Nations, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Elon Musk of Tesla) envisioned both an intensification and an extensification of ecological plunder and degradation. The types of centralization involved, argues this discussion paper, amounted to a great deal more than just “greenwashing,” extending to worldwide re-regulation of labour and land.

after Historic Legal Victory against Chevron
Union de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco

25 September 2021

Despite suffering 50 years of some of the world's worst oil-related contamination at the hands of Chevron and winning an historic 28-year battle that promised to result in a cleanup of the company's toxic legacy, Ecuadorian Indigenous plaintiffs in the case are now under legal attack from their own government.

Francesco Panie interviews Larry Lohmann

13 September 2021

Francesco Panie of the Italian environmental magazine La Nuova Ecologia interviews Larry Lohmann about how carbon markets work and why, even after 20 years of making climate change worse, they continue to befuddle many environmentalists and professors.

International Groups Condemn Detention and Fanciful Charges

26 April 2021

International anti-corruption and human rights groups have strongly condemned the detention of leading Nigerian anti-corruption activist Olanrewaju Suraju of HEDA, one of the first non-governmental groups to expose corruption allegations surrounding the acquisition of the OPL 245 oil field by oil multinationals Shell and Eni.

Landmark Judgment in Case of Okpabi and Others v Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDS) and Another

25 February 2021

On Friday 12 February 2021, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the Court of Appeal was wrong to refuse villagers from the Ogale and Bille communities in the Niger Delta permission to sue Royal Dutch Shell (RDS) in London for damages allegedly caused by numerous oil spills from Shell oil pipelines.

The Appeal Court had previously ruled that the English courts have no jurisdiction to hear the case because RDS was found not to exercise control over its Nigerian subsidiaries.

Calor, Tiempo y Colonialismo
Larry Lohmann

23 February 2021

Climate movements and energy transition movements customarily ask how energy might be generated and distributed more justly or democratically. Or how it might be made “green” or “renewable”. But one thing they usually don’t talk about is whether energy itself is unjust and undemocratic. And whether energy itself is anti-ecological.

And if so, What Does that Mean for Left Strategy?
Larry Lohmann

22 January 2021

In the 19th century, many new equivalences became embedded in the landscape among heat, mechanical force, muscle power, electricity, magnetism and so forth. At the same time, other relations also spread across some of the same spaces: wage labour relations, cotton slavery, new flows of waste and waste work and so on. These relations represent the hierarchies coded in thermodynamic or abstract energy. They are key to understanding today's energy as white, colonialist and patriarchal.

Larry Lohmann

21 October 2020

This half-hour presentation suggests that worldwide climate movement-building can benefit by striving toward more critical and historically-informed understandings of climatology, thermodynamics, green energy theory and dominant types of apocalypse thinking.

None of these four currents of thought, it argues, can form part of a realistic basis for global climate movement-building until the whiteness of each is better understood and worked on, particularly by middle-class climate activists from the global North.

Larry Lohmann

15 October 2020

This chapter from the free online peer-reviewed book Bioeconomy and Global Inequalities: Knowledge, Land, Labor, Biomass, Energy, and Politics, available at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-68944-5.pdf, argues that any serious study of bioenergy and global inequalities must take account of the oppression inherent in thermodynamic energy itself.

Contradictions of "Artificial Intelligence" in 21st-Century Capitalism
Larry Lohmann

13 July 2020

What is business getting itself into in its embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is it getting the world into? In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines." To do so, argues this version of an essay published in Socialist Register 2021, is to point to ecological and political continuities between 19th-century and 21st-century automation -- continuities that may help clarify strategies for popular struggle.

Supply Chains, Logistics and Labour
Nicholas Hildyard

28 February 2020

Logistics -- now a $4.7 trillion industry and said to be the world's largest employer -- is reshaping global production, distribution and consumption.

The implications for labour are profound. Automation in combination with just-in-time logistics regimes are subjecting workers to degrading just-in-time labour practices. More work is now contingent piece work; workers are increasingly subjected to electronic monitoring; work is increasingly degraded; and new forms of unpaid labour are proliferating, particularly online.

Resignifying Energy Transitions: Some Latin American Perspectives
Verónica Villa, Tatiana Roa Avendaño, Gabriela Cabaña, Cecilia Chérrez, Larry Lohmann

1 June 2023

Este artículo resume y sintetiza un diálogo sobre la necesidad de resignificar las propuestas dominantes para una transición energética.1 Estas iniciativas, coincidieron los participantes, sólo están profundizando los problemas ambientales y los conflictos sociales en los territorios de América Latina.

Larry Lohmann

24 August 2022

This exploratory working paper attempts to place the energy-intensive project of mechanizing interpretive labor known as artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the longer trajectory of post-18th century industrialization and the capitalist appropriation of human and nonhuman work.

Coming to Terms with Climate Change on the North Atlantic Left
Larry Lohmann

7 October 2021

"System change, not climate change" has long been a rallying cry of climate justice movements in the global North, as elsewhere. But, argues this contribution to the Indian online magazine GroundXero, the slogan can have several different meanings, with markedly different consequences for practical action, depending on who gets to define what "climate change" is.

Offworld Colonies, Racist Repression and ‘Nature-Based Solutions’
Larry Lohmann

20 May 2021

For the world’s richest and most powerful men -- men like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates -- the global environmental crisis has finally arrived. But what it means for them is not what it means for most people.

23 April 2021

The UK anti-corruption group Corner House has threatened legal action in response to a widely publicised Complaint sent on behalf of former Attorney General Mr Mohammed Bello Adoke SAN to Nigeria’s Inspector General of Police.

Adoke’s Complaint alleges “various acts of forgery” by “the parties responsible for the petition, investigations and commencement of the criminal trial at the court of Milan against the individuals/entities connected with the OPL 245 settlement agreement”.

A Time for Movement Reflection?
Larry Lohmann

30 August 2020

Many climate activists from the global North are unfamiliar with the idea that today’s dominant concepts of climate and energy -- together with the disciplines of climatology and thermodynamics -- are white.

Blockchain Machines, Earth Beings and the Labour of Trust
Larry Lohmann

15 August 2020

The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself.

Toward a Refreshed Agenda for Climate Activism?
Larry Lohmann

13 April 2020

Climate movements need to be wary about thinking about climate in terms of carbon. It is more effective to think about it in terms of work.

This is hard because the idea that climate is about carbon remains embedded in much climate thinking on both the right and the left. An illustrated presentation -- which includes a special guest appearance by the Covid-19 virus -- discusses both the difficulties and the necessity of moving on.

Trabajo, justicia y la mecanización de la interpretación
Larry Lohmann

3 August 2019

The biggest frontier of mechanization of the past ten years has been the automation, broadly speaking, of that particular type of human labour known as interpretation.

Some Stretching Exercises
Larry Lohmann

30 June 2019

This presentation at a recent conference at the University of Jena takes the view that contending with bioenergy development effectively will require social movements to respect – but also to update carefully – Marxian accounts of capital accumulation that tie together the labour theory of value, surplus accumulation, the “contradictory unity” of living and dead labour, mechanization, “vampirism,” class struggle, and the tendency toward falling profit rates.

La ecología de la mecanización de la confianza
Larry Lohmann

20 May 2019

The last decade's developments in computation are major topics of debate among business, policymakers, and social movements alike. Blockchain, Bitcoin, smart contracts, the Internet of Things, machine translation, image recognition, the Earth Bank of Codes, artificial intellligence – all are understood to be not only business opportunities but also political and environmental issues.

Permanent People's Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change
Alberto Acosta Espinosa, Lilia América Albert Palacios, Andrés Barreda, Upendra Baxi, Gill H. Boehringer, Maria Fernanda Campa, Louis Kotzé, Larry Lohmann, Francesco Martone, and Antoni Pigrau Solé

12 April 2019

In 2018, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal -- established in 1979 as a continuation of the Russell Tribunals on Vietnam (1966-67) and Latin America (1973-76) -- was requested by community organizations and academic groups to formulate an Advisory Opinion on fracking and other unconventional oil and gas extraction techniques.

In writing their Opinion, the judges considered material from two years of investigations and regional tribunals in a number of countries. The final session heard summary testimonies via a virtual platform on 14-18 May 2018.

Nicholas Hildyard

20 October 2018

The World Bank has invested almost a quarter of a billion dollars in Seven Energy, an oil and gas company operating in Nigeria. Months before the first investment was made, the then Governor of Nigeria's Central Bank alleged that the company's flagship contract involved operating a scheme that was looting billions of dollars in state revenues. A number of the people associated with the contract are now either on the run or charged with money laundering.

Larry Lohmann

11 July 2018

Today, a capitalist organization of fire dominates the world. Biotic fires in the open -- which ordinary people have long used to nurture agriculture and forests -- tend to be denigrated, even criminalized. More intense fossil-fuelled fires in combustion chambers, boilers and turbines, meanwhile, are tacitly encouraged as a sign of progress and civilization.

What with climate change and worldwide struggles to defend livelihoods against fossil fuels, vernacular struggles against this perverse organization of fire are sure to intensify.

A Critical Perspective for Community Resistance
Tamra Gilbertson

10 November 2017

Twenty years' experience has proved that carbon trading is making climate change worse. Rather than combating the continued use of fossil fuels, it is designed in a way that keeps them coming out of the ground. Faced with this reality, some environmentalists, states and corporations are advocating carbon taxes as an "alternative". But carbon taxes are no better equipped to address the roots of global warming than carbon trading.

Larry Lohmann

12 October 2017

In its never-ending struggles to get the upper hand over workers, business has often dreamed of perpetual motion machines: devices that could deliver work without workers or the fossil fuels needed to power the engines that discipline them. The dream can only ever be a dream, however. Not only are perpetual motion machines physically impossible. Even if they could be built, they would destroy capital itself. Business cannot do without the human and nonhuman activity that it coopts, degrades and exhausts in cycle after cycle, because it is the source of the value it seeks.

Nicholas Hildyard

28 November 2016

This presentation explores the connections between injustices carried out as part of the 'War on Terror' and against those opposing fossil fuels.

Some Questions from the Netherworld
Nicholas Hildyard

18 April 2016

This public lecture raises questions about the direction of mainstream discussions on energy, technology, finance, accumulation, and organising.

Nicholas Hildyard

18 April 2016

It is critical to recognise that energy is a labour issue if the shift away from fossil fuels is to do more than just help elites find new tools for exploiting the majority world.

El Cuestionamiento de la Transición Energética
Larry Lohmann

5 December 2015

What is an energy transition? Usually the term signifies a shift away from fossil fuels and the technologies that require them. The question that naturally follows is: how is this shift to be financed? This short paper for the Spanish e-newsletter ECOS outines some of the pitfalls associated with this way of looking at climate and energy issues. It argues that it may be helpful to take a step back and begin with a different set of questions: What is energy? Is energy what we really want? Or do we perhaps want to open ourselves to different ways of organizing nature?

A Proposal for the 2015 Paris Climate Summit
Oilwatch International

24 November 2015

During 20 years of UN climate negotiations, countries classified according to the UN climate convention as Annex I and II have prevented specific and binding actions to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, the root of global warming. The international Oilwatch network is proposing a new Annex – Annex Zero – of the Indigenous Peoples and nations, provinces, states, sub-national regions and localities that actually are doing something to keep fossil fuels in the ground, and is collecting commitments from like-minded people who would like to be part of Annex Zero.

. . . talking climate in public space
India Climate Justice Collective

5 November 2015

The fifth issue of  Mausam, a magazine published by the India Climate Justice Collective that connects climate debates to local struggles over land, livelihood and food rights, has a multi-pronged critique of India's INDC – Intended Nationally Determined Contribution – submitted to the UNFCCC in anticipation of the December 2015 climate meeting in Paris.

Climate Change as Labour Issue
Larry Lohmann

24 July 2015

To make the alliances they may need, radical social movements can benefit from questioning not only the distribution and methods of production of energy, but also the 19th-century concept of energy itself -- a constitutive element of the very problems the term is commonly used to discuss. A presentation available from The Corner House upon request sketches some of the issues involved.

Talking Climate in Public Space
India Climate Justice Collective

30 April 2015

The fourth issue of the new Mausam, a magazine published by the India Climate Justice collective, aims to facilitate constructive and creative debate on climate issues, connecting them to local struggles over natural resources, fossil fuel extraction, and land, livelihood and food rights.

Talking Climate in Public Space
India Climate Justice Collective

19 March 2015

This third issue of Mausam, a magazine published by the India Climate Justice collective, aims to facilitate constructive and creative debate on climate issues, connecting them to local struggles over natural resources, fossil fuel extraction, and land, livelihood and food rights.

Sondeando el territorio
Larry Lohmann con Nicholas Hildyard y Sarah Sexton (traducido por Fernanda Olmedo y Martin Carbonell)

30 June 2014

Una creciente crisis climática y el aumento de la incertidumbre sobre el futuro de los combustibles fósiles hace que la pregunta, planteada con frecuencia,¿cuál es la alternativa a los sistemas actuales de la energía? no sea una sorpresa . Y no ha habido escasez de respuestas que compiten por espacio y atención. En la política energética actual, el principal conflicto no es entre los negocios habituales y "La Alternativa", sino entre las diferentes alternativas propuestas. ¿Cómo se deben evaluar estas alternativas, unas frente a las otras? (Spanish translation of The Corner House report Energy Alternatives: Surveying the Territory)

¿Para Quién y Para Qué?
The Corner House

23 June 2014

La expresión "seguridad energética" está llena de problemas, tanto como en lo político y en la retórica. Otros conceptos deben encontrarse para discutir sobre la energía y para buscar un futuro que sea democrático y libre de combustibles fósiles. (Spanish translation of The Corner House report Energy Security: For Whom? For What?)

Talking Climate in Public Space
India Climate Justice Collective

31 May 2014

The second issue of Mausam, a magazine published by the India Climate Justice collective, aims to facilitate constructive and creative debate on climate issues.

Larry Lohmann and Nicholas Hildyard

31 March 2014

This 124-page report aims to understand how energy and finance have been constructed and contested during stormy transformations in industry, livelihood and exploitation over the past two centuries. Its goal is to help effective movements seeking finance for a greener, more democratic, liveable energy future regard both energy and finance as political processes in motion and as continuing social struggles.

Vol 1, Issue 1, Oct-Dec 2013
India Climate Justice

31 December 2013

The relaunched magazine Mausam, produced by the India Climate Justice network and collective.

Larry Lohmann

30 November 2013

Energy politics is all about labour politics. But it is also about struggles over commons, since the emergence of energy itself was a form of enclosure of commons. What are the implications for activist strategy?

Surveying the Territory
Larry Lohmann with Nicholas Hildyard and Sarah Sexton

20 May 2013

What with a growing climate crisis and increasing uncertainty over the future of fossil fuels, it can be no surprise that the question “what's the alternative to current energy systems?” is in the air. And there has been no shortage of answers competing for space and attention. In energy policy today, the main conflict is not between business as usual and “The Alternative”, but among the different proposed alternatives themselves. How are these alternatives to be evaluated against each other?

Nicholas Hildyard and Larry Lohmann

31 March 2013

Too often, discussions about energy alternatives resemble a visit to a 1950s world's fair exhibition displaying exhibits of the wonderful technology of the future. Against one wall stand shiny replicas of new green machines – wind turbines, solar panels, fuel cells, hypercars, supergrids – alongside diagrams showing how environmentally benign they are. Against another are arrayed labeled bottles of new “substitutes” for oil, coal and gas – corn-based ethanol, rapeseed-based biodiesel, hydrogen cracked out of water, hydrocarbons extruded by algae.

Large-Scale Biomass Subsidies in the UK and the Role of the EU ETS
Joseph Zacune

31 May 2012

UK-based power companies are using the myth that biomass is 'carbon neutral' to continue their climate-damaging activities unabated. A British biomass boom is set to benefit polluters and cause widespread environmental destruction through land grabs and deforestation.

A Critical Look at Desertec
Oscar Reyes

31 March 2012

Challenges have been repeatedly raised about the economic viability and development benefits of Desertec, a plan to build concentrated solar power plants in the Middle East and North Africa and export the electricity generated to the EU. Promoting exaggerated claims of solar mega-projects and embedding them within a neo-liberal model of energy market liberalisation undermines and discredits efforts to move rapidly away from fossil fuels. 

Nicholas Hildyard, Larry Lohmann and Sarah Sexton

16 February 2012

"Energy security" is full of pitfalls, both as policy and as rhetoric. Other ways are urgently needed of discussing and organising for a democratic, fossil-free future.

The Consequences of EU Energy Policies
The Corner House

24 May 2011

The European Union’s 2008 Energy Security and Solidarity Action Plan does not address conflict, insecurity, human rights, militarisation or the Millennium Development Goals. Most critically, it does not ask the questions Energy Security for Whom? or Energy Security for What?

Background and history

9 March 2011

In March 2011, following a Complaint lodged under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises by six environment and human rights groups (including The Corner House) back in April 2003, the UK government ruled that oil multinational BP is breaking international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies in its operations on its Caspian oil pipeline.

Ruling places BP in breach of its loan agreements, say campaigners

9 March 2011

A BP-led consortium is breaking international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies in its operations on the controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the UK Government ruled today.

ECGD's assessment of Petrobras P-52 oil production platform

1 July 2010

A UK government department is underwriting loans taken out by the Brazilian state-run energy company, Petrobras, for an offshore oil production platform operating in the Atlantic Ocean in even deeper waters than those in the Gulf of Mexico where BP's exploration well is spewing forth oil after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank in April this year.

Talking Climate in Public Space
NESPON, NFFPFW and Nagarik Mancha

1 September 2009

Here is an issue of an Indian magazine aimed at returning the dialogue about climate change and its solutions to the "public space." Featured are pathbreaking articles uncovering the reality of UN-sanctioned "carbon saving" projects in the metals, hydroelectric, wind power, chemicals, waste management and electricity generating sectors, as well as analyses of the political economy of the scientific controversies over the monsoon and over Asia's so-called "brown cloud" of pollution.

BPU Review made public after Information Tribunal

11 August 2009

After the BTC Consortium, led by BP, formally asked the UK's export credit agency, ECGD, for financial support for its BTC oil pipeline project, ECGD's Business Principles Unit (BPU) assessed the potential environmental and social impacts of the project. The BPU's findings and recommendations were critical to ECGD's issuing significant financial guarantees for the project in February 2004.

 

When The Corner House put in an information request for a copy of the BPU's report, it was refused. Only after appeals and counter appeals was the information finally released in August 2009.

A training for government officials and civil servants in Iraq

16 December 2008

The Corner House and others carried out a training session to assist Iraqi government officials and civil servants in understanding the principles of human rights and Iraq's international obligations in relation to investment agreements.

Financial Bricolage, Derivatives and Power
Nicholas Hildyard

9 October 2008

39. Financial entrepreneurs created a 'shadow banking system' over the past 30 years to circumvent regulation and to offload risk onto others, relying on 'derivatives' and 'securitisation'. They generated easy credit that fuelled a boom in corporate mergers and acquisitions across the United States and Europe, and that enabled companies involved in mining, biofuels, private health care, water supply, infrastructure and forestry to expand their activities significantly. When the pyramid of deals came tumbling down, however, the public had to bear the costs.

Connections with Financial and Foreign Policy
Sarah Sexton

24 September 2008

This presentation raises some concerns about the term "energy security". presentation at PLATFORM's "Unravelling the Carbon Web".

ECGD did not assess human rights impacts of conflict risks

26 August 2008

The route of the BTC pipeline from Armenia through Georgia to Turkey passes in or near seven existing conflict zones, including South Ossetia and Armenia. The Corner House raised this issue with the UK’s export credit agency, ECGD, the National Audit Office and the Environmental Audit Committee of the UK Parliament.

in Defence of Community Land and Religion against the Trans Thai-Malaysian Pipeline and Industrial Project (TTM) 2002-2008
Chana activists and others

1 August 2008

For many years, Southern Thai Muslim communities have been fighting a destructive gas development backed by Barclays and other foreign banks that has violated their human, religious, environmental and land rights alike. In words and pictures, this book (now in an updated and revised edition) recounts their struggle.

A Decade of Resistance in Southern Thailand
Larry Lohmann

30 May 2008

Slowing and halting new fossil fuel developments has moved to the top of the global climate change agenda. But what are the obstacles to, and resources for, such a project? The 10-year struggle against a gas development project in one corner of Southeast Asia, described in this article in the journal Race & Class, offers lessons in some of the complexities.

over Sakhalin II oil-and-gas project
WWF-UK and The Corner House

15 August 2007

On 15 August 2007, WWF and The Corner House filed for a judicial review of a legally-binding, but until recently undisclosed, decision in March 2004 by the UK Government's Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) to support the Sakhalin II oil-and-gas project off the far eastern coast of Russia.

on Updated Analysis and Continued Opposition to Financing for Sakhalin II
15 NGOs

2 August 2007

In August 2007, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) was considering financing the Sakhalin II oil and gas project. Some 15 environmental organisations wrote this updated analysis and renewed their call for the Bank to decline financing.

Nicholas Hildyard

30 May 2007

This article summarises the main issues arising from the BTC oil pipeline runing from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Tbilisi in Georgia to a new marine terminal at Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast that has been developed by a consortium of companies led by the British oil multinational BP. These include the project agreements between the consortium and the three countries; safety concerns; and concerns over due diligence and monitoring.

ECGD

20 May 2007

ECGD responded to a request under the Environmental Information Regulations for ECGD's information on monitoring the Sakhalin II oil and gas project.

Simon Clark and Stephen Voss

1 February 2007

This Bloomberg Markets article describes the allegations by BP consultant Derek Mortimore that the engineering company contracted to monitor the BTC oil pipeline has no experience in pipeline corrosion work.

Assessment Against ECGD Policies on Project Acceptability
The Corner House, Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and Northern Ireland), WWF-UK

26 April 2006

Any ECGD support for the Anglo-Dutch petrochemical multinational Shell to develop two oil and gas fields off Sakhalin Island in Russia's Far East would breach international guidelines and conflict with the UK's sustainable development commitments and its international environmental obligations.

30 March 2006

The legal agreement signed by Turkey with the company building the BTC pipeline breaches the country's legal obligations to the EU aimed at it becoming an EU member. The European Court ruled in March 2006, however, that EU's decisions (and lack of decisions) on accession issues are a matter of discretion and internal concern alone, and cannot therefore be challenged through the courts.

Investment Agreements and Corporate Colonialism
Nicholas Hildyard and Greg Muttit

11 February 2006

Many corporations now rely on bilateral and regional treaties to get what they want in other countries. Some companies are using Host Government Agreements to set up a specific legal framework giving them effective control over national legislation and regulations affecting their activities. Oil and gas companies are using Production Sharing Agreements to gain almost complete control over natural resources in the countries of the former Soviet Union and West Africa and in Iraq.

Request to ECGD for information regarding BTC oil pipeline

13 December 2005

ECGD released some information related to the coating on the BTC oil pipeline in response to a Corner House information request. 

Litigation and Standards
Nicholas Hildyard

3 December 2005

International finance institutions promise that the projects they back will comply with international environmental and social standards -- but these standards are frequently flouted. NGOs can document such violations so as to bring concerns to decision-makers, the wider public and the courts.

21 November 2005

The Common Terms Agreement, signed between the public sector lenders to the BTC oil pipeline project and the BP-led consortium building it, includes the environmental and social conditions to which the consortium agreed to adhere.

Trade and Industry Committee Inquiry into Implementation of ECGD's Business Principles

4 April 2005

The UK Parliament's Trade and Industry Committee held an inquiry into support provided for the BTC pipeline by the UK's export credit agency, ECGD. It focused on allegations that the companies involved knew about safety problems with the anti-corrosion coating chosen to seal the pipeline's joints before it was buried, but did not disclose them to ECGD. Contrary to previous public and parliamentary assurances, ECGD officials admitted to the inquiry that the coating had not been properly tested and it was being used for the first time.

Michael Gillard

24 November 2004

In February 2004, the Sunday Times newspaper published an article by Michael Gillard, detailing reports that the coating selected to seal the joints of the BTC oil pipeline before it was buried was "utterly inappropriate" and could cause the pipeline to leak. This expanded article provides more detail.

Confirmation of conditional support
Export Credits Guarantee Department

4 March 2004

In response to a Freedom of Information request from The Corner House, the UK's Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) released a letter it had written on 4 March 2004 to the Sakhalin Energy Investment Company confirming that it had approved conditional support for several UK contracts for the Sakhalin II project.

A critical review

1 October 2003

The Baku Ceyhan Campaign, of which The Corner House is a part, carried out a detailed study of the Environmental Impact Assessment for the Turkish section of BP's Caspian oil pipeline, and found 173 violations of international standards, including the World Bank's own lending policies.

Corporate strategy for dealing with NGOs

1 January 2002

The "divide and rule" corporate public relations strategy for dealing with NGOs raising issues about the BTC oil pipeline is made explicit in this presentation on the project's Environmental & Social Impact Assessment, released under FOIA.

The Politics and Culture of Combustion
Stephen J. Pyne with Larry Lohmann

28 February 2000

Sensational images of wildfires often prompt calls for sweeping, high-tech measures to control fire in the open. Yet fire in the open is a planetary necessity. The problem is too little controlled open burning in the North, and too much wildfire in the South -- and too many catastrophic, destructive blazes and not enough cleansing, fertilizing ones. Constructive debate about climate change, agriculture or forestry requires a careful look at the culture, ecology and politics of global fire.

The Danger of MOX-fuelled Nuclear Reactors
Frank Barnaby

30 December 1999

Plutonium is radioactive by-product of nuclear reactors and one of the most toxic substances known. The nuclear industry argues that producing mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel would reduce plutonium stockpiles. It is unlikely to do so and instead would encourage the risk of nuclear terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons.

IGA, HGAs, Joint Statement and Human Rights Undertaking

1 November 1999

The BTC Consortium negotiated several legal agreements with each of the three countries through which its Caspian oil pipeline crosses.

Democracy in a Plutonium Economy
Frank Barnaby

2 November 1997

Plutonium is a radioactive by-product of nuclear reactors and one of the most toxic substances known. The nuclear industry argues that it should be mixed with uranium oxide and used in ordinary nuclear reactors as mixed-oxide or MOX fuel elements. Yet this would produce more plutonium; cost more than conventional nuclear fuel; be less safe; increase the risk of serious accidents during transportation; necessitate extreme high security to prevent theft; and increase the risk of nuclear weapon proliferation by countries and terrorist organisations.

A February 2004 Sunday Times article alleged that BP knew about safety faults with its anti-corrosion sealant coating for its Caspian oil pipeline, but did not disclose them when trying to secure funding from publicly-funded export credit agencies and multilateral development banks. A UK government minister and officials from the UK's export credit agency gave public assurances that the coating had been used extensively elsewhere on similar pipelines, but subsequently-released documents indicate that it had not.

Between 2002 and 2005, The Corner House and its partners conducted fact-finding missions to areas along the route of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline to gather information about community expectations and opinions, impacts, and the consultation and land expropriation process carried out by the BTC consortium (led by British oil multinational BP) building the pipeline.