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Business Home Internet The World Bank is considering how to respond to an independent report that recommends the institution phase out investment in oil projects by the end of 2008 because of environmental concerns, a bank official said this week.

Meanwhile, environmental groups want ABN Amro and all other Equator banks to withdraw their support for Sakhalin II. But despite concerns from green groups, public lenders and private banks are clamouring to fund oil and gas projects, hungry countries such as the United States, Japan and members of the European Union, who are also major shareholders in public banks. The United States, the main customer for the Sakhalin project, has been encouraging oil projects almost anywhere outside of the Arab Gulf as it tries to lessen its dependence on Middle Eastern oil, citing the region's instability and its population's anger at U.S. policies.

Business Mlm Opportunity The Extractive Industry Review was commissioned by bank president James Wolfensohn and started work in July 2001, after criticism from the nongovernmental community about the bank's work in extractive industries.

based centre says that an independent jury cited ABN AMRO's work in helping to inspire, create and implement the Equator Principles for the award. The episode comes amidst global concern over climate change and the role played by oil and gas projects in raising the earth's temperatures and damaging the world's ecosystems. American Development Bank, which lends to Latin American nations from its headquarters in Washington, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) have all come under fire for funding projects in the environmentally damaging extractive industries like oil, gas and mining.

Based Business Home Income The study, which also recommends the bank stay out of activities in coal mining, was led by former Indonesian environment minister Emil Salim.

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Based Business Home Internet Two of the bank's most controversial recent projects, the Chad-Cameroon and the Caspian oil pipelines, were approved by the lender's shareholders in the face of fierce opposition from environmental and nongovernmental groups who said the projects would do more harm than good.

These institutions', American Development Bank, World Bank, U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, U.S. Import Bank, $352 million in approved financing for 18 projects; thus, fossil fuel financing in the Americas outpaces clean energy by a ratio of 63 to 1. Most of this investment in fossil fuels has come from US taxpayers, who are unwitting underwriters of loans, guarantees and subsidies to Big Oil. Although the Americas have obtained over $22 billion in public support for fossil fuels since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, most of this oil and gas has been exported to the U.S.

Business Homebased Opportunity Asked in a briefing if the bank would take into account the report's recommendation on oil, Rashad Kaldany, director of the World Bank Group's oil, gas, mining and chemicals department, said at a briefing: "It is one of the ones that we will study carefully and that we need to consult further with various stakeholders."

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Based Business Home Mlm He said the bank's management, after consultations with the institution's 184 country shareholders, will respond early next year. The authors of the report are due to meet in Lisbon later this week to finalized the details.

Business New Opportunity Kaldany said the bank was looking into the recommendations in the report which said the institution should "devote its limited scarce resources to investments in renewable energy. resource development, emissions-reducing projects, clean energy technology, energy efficiency and conservation, and other efforts that de-link energy use from greenhouse gas emissions."

Business Home Online The World Bank is not obliged to follow the recommendations in the report but nongovernmental groups have seized on the findings to urge the bank to change its ways.

Best Business Home Opportunity "The oil and coal industries increase poverty, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation locally and globally, and the World Bank has no business using our tax dollars to support them," Steve Kretzmann who works at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think-tank said in a statement last week.

Business Investment Kaldany said the bank has changed the ways it carries out oil projects but said it is still early to say whether this has made a difference to them.

Business Home Making Money "On the one side this report says yes there's a role for extractive industries, yes there's a role for the World Bank group... but on the other side they are saying phase out or get out of certain sub-sectors," he said.

Based Business Free Home "We would like to understand better what is the logic."

Business Internet Online Reuters - 12/11/2003

Topic: Petroleum Industry

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