Potential Export-Import Bank deals pose grave environmental threat, experts say

Source: The Guardian

Potential Export-Import Bank deals pose grave environmental threat, experts say

Hannah Furfaro
Wednesday 7 December 2016 17.03 GMT

Congress quashed the hopes late Tuesday of reviving the United States’ export credit agency, which had been aiming for a stopgap lifeline allowing them to approve more than $20bn in new deals, many of which pose imminent harms to the environment.

Now, the fate of a pristine coral reef, an east African mangrove forest, and the livelihoods of farmers and fishermen in a south-east Asian river delta lie in the hands of a new Congress and president.

Since 2009, when Barack Obama became president, the Export-Import Bank has signed almost $34bn worth of low-interest loans and guarantees to companies and foreign governments to build, expand and promote fossil fuel projects abroad, according to an investigation by the Guardian and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism’s Energy and Environmental Reporting Project.

That spending has undermined Obama’s record on climate change emissions. And critics say several proposed bank financing projects would further erode Obama’s climate legacy, undercutting the carbon reductions he has made domestically with new emissions abroad.

Among the roughly 30 new projects the bank is considering are a coal-fueled power plant in Vietnam’s Mekong delta; a natural gas liquefaction plant in Mozambique; power plants in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan; and a petrochemical complex in Egypt expected to emit 3m metric tonnes of greenhouse gases annually.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/07/export-import-bank-fossil-fuel-plants-vietnam-mozambique