• 42 per cent of Africa’s greenhouse gases are emitted by South Africa. So you would think that South Africa is a fairly developed nation with good employment rates. Not so.
• 41 per cent of South Africa’s potential workforce is employed, according to Advorp Holding’s chief executive Richard Pike.
• 16 per cent is the total amount of energy consumed by South Africa’s residents.
• 44 per cent of South Africa’s energy is used by 36 companies. Industry, mining, agriculture and commerce use more than 70 per cent of all energy produced.
• 11 per cent of South Africa’s energy is used by one company, the Australian multinational BHP Billiton.
• 9.7 billion South African Rand was the loss that Eskom, the South African power utility, made because of the provision of cheap electricity to BHP Billiton, according to Eskom’s annual report, March 2010.
• 50 per cent below cost is what BHP Billiton paid for this electricity, which is around 1.7 US cents per kWh.
• Four million homes cook without electricity, according to the Citizens United for Renewable Energies and Sustainability (CURES).
• 2.5 million homes do not have electricity.
• Ten million people experienced periodic electricity cut-offs between 1994 and 2002, according to Queens University researcher David McDonald.

This is not a story of a democratic state, but rather of a state that has failed to deliver to its people. It is a state that is managed for the benefit of multinational corporations.
Energy sovereignty
It is against this backdrop that people have to take control over their own energy provision. As in the case of the Nyeleni Declaration on food sovereignty, energy sovereignty should put those ‘who produce, distribute and consume’ energy at the heart of the energy systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations.
Viewed in a global context, one realises that the underdevelopment of the greater population of South Africa is not a mere hangover from apartheid. It is an active process of the development choices made by the South African government today. This development trajectory is facilitated by global finance and the ongoing development paradigm of extraction of Africa’s resources for the benefit of consumption in the global North.
It is common knowledge that 80 per cent of the World Bank’s oil extraction investment in Africa is for Northern consumption. In South Africa, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank’s £4 billion investment in Eskom’s coal-fired power stations facilitates the same process.
With the lack of energy access by the majority of people in South Africa, the battle to avoid catastrophic climate change is deeply intertwined with the battle to achieve access to clean, affordable energy. Because people do not have access to energy from Eskom, they are forced to burn coal indoors. Coupling this domestic pollution with heavy industrial pollution is a recipe for disaster.
Consider the fact that from May to August 2010, the South African ambient air pollution standards protecting health were exceeded on 570 occasions in the Highveld. People’s right to an environment that is not harmful to one’s health and wellbeing was therefore broken on 570 occasions. This is not a surprise in this area considering the presence of ten Eskom coal-fired power stations and Sasol’s synfuel plant, which has the dubious distinction of being the highest single source greenhouse gas emitter in the world. So while all this energy production is around people, directly impacting upon their health, they get very little of the energy. Access to energy is a struggle.
It is in this context that South Africans need another energy future. An energy future that ensures decent levels of affordable basic services and infrastructure to be enjoyed by all as a basic human right – not only by ‘consumers’ who can afford them. An energy future where individuals and families are able to access, at minimum, the most basic necessities of human life, starting with nutritious food, clean water, safe and comfortable accommodation, and a clean healthy environment where people live and work. And these necessities must be nurtured by the very way in which people live and work, not undermined by them.
To deliver the above, the people of South Africa, not multinational corporations, must be at the centre of energy delivery. People have to start taking ownership of how energy is produced – not only the physical production but the democratic decisions on how production and distribution is organised.
Hoodwink no more
The South Africa leadership cannot continue to hoodwink its people and the world. Its Copenhagen offer to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a 34 per cent ‘deviation’ below baseline by 2020 and 42 per cent below baseline by 2025 is based upon an assumption of growth without constraint. According to the South African Long-Term Mitigation Strategy (LTMS), this will take South Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions from 440 million tons in 2003 to 1,600 million tons by 2050. This is an inaccurate and politically naive claim of carbon rights it does not have. Based upon present figures, South Africa already reached 500 million tons in 2008. Its commitment to 42 per cent renewables in the future energy development mix only translates to 9 per cent renewables in 2030.
The government also throws figures around about how many millions of people have been connected to the electricity grid. It presents the installation of prepaid meters as a panacea, so that people can ‘better manage’ their consumption. In reality, this means that people can be the agents of their own disconnection when they do not have enough money to pay for the most expensive electricity in the country.
South Africans have to start challenging this political greenwash and start working on systems that give them independence from big power producers such as Eskom. This would mean getting small local municipalities to start thinking of local energy development for their own needs. It would mean calling for better housing so that in winter people do not lose energy through leaking roofs and poorly constructed state homes. It would mean that individual households get access to affordable energy and don’t have to pay up to seven times more for their electricity than industry does. And it would mean ensuring that industry pays the real price of energy and doesn’t continue to get the cheapest electricity in the world at the expense of the people. n
Bobby Peek is director of the South African environmental justice organisation groundWork (Friends of the Earth South Africa)

Like much else under the coalition government, Britain’s nuclear energy programme was set in motion by New Labour and continues unchanged, despite being opposed in the Lib Dem manifesto. Yet the case for nuclear is more overwhelming in its persistence than its attractiveness as a proposition. Nuclear reactors remain prohibitively expensive to build, notoriously subject to delay, expensive to secure, and impossible to clean up with any certainty. So why do they continue to attract the support of politicians once they gain power?

The lights that never go out

Like so much else in energy politics, fear of supply shortages is a crucial part of the explanation. ‘I have no intention of the lights going out on my watch,’ said the coalition’s energy and climate change secretary Chris Huhne in August, as he stated his support for a new reactor at Hinkley Point in Somerset, scheduled to open in 2018.

Yet this fails to tell the whole story. Huhne’s 2018 estimate is already a year later than the original plan for Hinkley, which is only at the ‘pre-application’ stage of the planning process. Long delays are the norm in nuclear development, and while the most optimistic estimates suggest that a new station could be ready by the end of the decade, the House of Commons trade and industry committee reported in 2006 that: ‘Experience in the UK to date has shown . . . an average construction period for existing nuclear power stations of almost 11 years.’

In 2007, the Department of Trade and Industry reported that a third of the UK’s electricity generation capacity would be retired over the next two decades. This would include two-thirds of the existing nuclear capacity (8GW), and almost a third of currently operating coal plants (another 8GW). Together with the projected growth in energy demand, the 2007 energy white paper estimated that the UK would need to add up to 35GW to the grid, with two-thirds of this already in place by 2020.

The bottom line is simple: a nuclear power programme that is intended to replace existing capacity will come too late to replace that capacity. So why, then, the enthusiasm for new nukes?

Playing the carbon card

In the aftermath of Chernobyl, the abiding image of the nuclear industry was the blue glow of an apocalyptic meltdown. In recent years, however, the nuclear industry has bathed itself in a green glow of climate friendliness. This greenwashing of nuclear power as a ‘solution’ to climate change is widespread.

Nuclear energy is not ‘carbon neutral’, although it is often treated as such. Uranium mining, enrichment and transport, as well as the construction and decommissioning of nuclear facilities, generate significant carbon dioxide emissions that are at least double those of wind power, according to Germany’s Öko-Institut. Yet these emissions are mostly outsourced, which keeps them off the radar of political decision makers whose field of policy vision seems to reach only as far as the UK coastlines where most nuclear reactors will be located.

That said, it is indisputably the case that nuclear power produces far fewer greenhouse gases than coal or gas, its main rivals as far as the large energy companies are concerned. On every other environmental measure, however, nuclear power remains as dirty as it is risky.

As Greenpeace puts it, ‘The UK now has enough radioactive waste to fill the Royal Albert Hall five times over.’ Despite a series of government reviews on decommissioning, there is still no long-term means to deal with radioactive waste safely, ensuring that it won’t contaminate water supplies or leak back into the environment and food chain.

This risk to future generations should be seen against a backdrop of the massive environmental damage that is already being caused. From Kazakhstan to Canada, uranium mining leaves a legacy of polluted land and water supplies. To produce around 25 tonnes of uranium, the amount needed to supply an average sized reactor for a year, entails the extraction of half a million tonnes of waste rock and more than 100,000 tonnes of mill tailings – which remain polluted for thousands of years.

On top of these environmental concerns, there remain major security risks – most notably from the stockpiling of plutonium, the key element in the creation of nuclear weapons – and significant doubts about the economic viability of nuclear power.

The numbers game

The current construction budget of Britain’s new generation of nuclear power stations is estimated at around £50 billion, but these projected costs conceal as much as they reveal.

The nuclear industry has consistently underestimated the cost of building reactors. The projected costs of 75 nuclear reactors in the US amounted to $45 billion, but the actual costs once built were $145 billion, according to research by Greenpeace International. The high-profile Olkiluoto reactor in Finland, which was intended as the flagship of a ‘new generation’ of reactors, has seen a doubling in its estimated cost from EUR3 billion to EUR6 billion. The most recent reactor in the UK (at Sizewell B) was estimated at £1.7 billion, but ended up costing £3.7 billion.

This initial cost of building nuclear plants is way in excess of their fossil-fuel powered rivals, which poses serious questions about their economic viability. In the UK’s liberalised energy markets, the risk of investing in nuclear is simply too high, since the large upfront costs cannot necessarily be recouped in the current climate of fluctuating energy supply and prices. Studies that claim otherwise tend to manipulate the ‘discount rate’, which is the comparison between how much the plant costs, and how much money could otherwise have been accrued by leaving the money in the bank to gain interest. When proponents of nuclear power are showcasing its viability, this rate is set low. When they argue for subsidies, the rate is set higher.

The hidden hands behind the hidden hand

At present, much of the debate is focused on whether the UK government will provide public subsidies to build nuclear power stations. The coalition has continued the policy of the previous government in announcing that it won’t do so. Yet here, too, the devil lies in the detail.

The coalition agreement includes a commitment to a ‘floor price’ on the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS), which would be a thinly veiled subsidy. (The pledge also contains an implicit recognition, although a far from profound one, that the EU ETS is failing.) The rationale is that shoring up the price of carbon, which has fluctuated wildly since the inception of the EU ETS in 2005, would provide greater certainty in how to calculate the costs of pollution by fossil-fuel power stations.

The EU ETS treats nuclear as carbon-free, so it would stand to benefit from such a move. In practice, though, it looks distinctly unlikely that the government will be able to deliver on this promise in the context of an EU-wide scheme. If it does, the floor price is likely simply to be a carbon tax by another name. This, in turn, would have a far greater effect on the profitability of existing power stations than the likelihood of building new ones.

EDF, which is 85 per cent owned by the French government, is the main operator of nuclear power stations in the UK, having purchased British Energy (which runs eight of the 10 UK nuclear sites) in 2008. It is no surprise, then, that it has lobbied vociferously for a carbon floor price. It stands to gain a windfall of around £400 million per year (assuming a price of £10 per ton of CO2). If the price was set at £50 per ton, a level considered more ‘viable’ to incentivise investment in nuclear power, it would net EDF around £2 billion per year for its existing power stations.

Two even more significant subsidies already exist, moreover. As Peter Roche, of industry monitoring group No 2 Nuclear Power, explained to Red Pepper, ‘In the event of a nuclear accident, the nuclear operating companies don’t have to provide proper insurance. Beyond a certain level, the UK government underwrites the cleanup costs. Without this guarantee, or hidden subsidy, it is doubtful if anyone could afford to build new nuclear power stations.’

The costs of decommissioning existing nuclear waste have also fallen largely onto the state, as Chris Huhne lamented shortly after taking up his post as secretary of state in May. On finding a £4 billion budget hole relating to unavoidable nuclear decommissioning and waste costs, Huhne spoke of an ‘existential problem’ facing his department, which he told the Guardian was ‘not so much the department of energy and climate change, as the department of nuclear legacy and bits of other things.’

Forced choices

Huhne’s conflicted conscience on nuclear power reflects the possibility that it could emerge as a wedge issue dividing opinion within the coalition. In a statement that reads like it was scripted by Private Eye, Huhne claims that he was never anti-nuclear and was simply ‘misunderstood’. Yet as recently as November 2007, he wrote: ‘Nuclear is a tried, tested and failed technology and the government must stop putting time, effort and subsidies into reviving this outdated industry.’

However, Huhne’s recent enthusiasm should not be ‘misunderstood’ either. A quick look at the right-wing press, or the outpourings of the Adam Smith Institute, shows that Huhne remains under fire for damaging the nuclear industry. They accuse the Lib Dems of being behind the cancellation of an £80 million loan to Sheffield Forgemasters to build nuclear power plant components, while the continued inclusion of nuclear power within the climate change levy is criticised as harming the nuclear industry. Changing the rules of this scheme, or cutting off renewable energy incentives such as the current feed-in tariff scheme, could fall within the terms of the coalition agreement without amounting to a new ‘subsidy’.

Ultimately, though, the strongest driver for new nuclear power stations is the perceived paucity of other options. Nuclear benefits from the perception that it is the worst form of energy except for all of the others. The key selling point of nuclear power is that it is a technology that is ideally suited to the provision of ‘baseload’ energy. Put simply, electricity usage fluctuates widely, but grid supply has to remain constant. Baseload is the ‘always on’ electricity production required to meet minimum levels of demand, which is supplemented by sources that are switched on and off as customer use fluctuates.

From the perspective of the energy industry, nuclear power is ideally suited to this purpose, with existing plants typically run at full throttle. Wind power, by contrast, is seen as being as fickle as the wind itself. It is too unreliable, says the industry, so even if the UK builds more turbines, these would need to be backed up by nuclear, coal or gas generation capacity. And in the case of gas, the UK government (like many of its European counterparts) is wary of over-reliance on Russia, a fear that was exacerbated by the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine in 2009.

Yet is energy supply really such a forced choice? For one thing, nuclear power is not quite the ‘always on’ bedrock of reliability that its advocates claim. Aside from routine repairs and refuelling, there have been a series of safety shutdowns in the UK, which sometimes span years.

More generally, though, the concept of always-on baseload energy at the centre of electricity production reproduces the assumption that power must be sourced from large, grid-connected power systems. While it is true that wind power is variable, no one credibly suggests that the UK switch its entire capacity to wind. Variations in one renewable technology, along with enhanced energy storage capacity, can balance out another. A diversity of smaller energy sources – not all of which need electricity grid connections – not only enhances the flexibility of the system, but also reduces the significant losses of power through transmissions networks.

More than half of UK domestic greenhouse gas emissions arise from space heating, with a further fifth coming from heating water, according to the Centre for Alternative Technology’s Zero Carbon Britain report (see Red Pepper Aug/Sep 2010). An emphasis on better building regulations, including incentives for the retrofitting and insulation of old buildings, has been proven by numerous analyses to be both faster and more cost effective than building new power generating capacity. Regulatory weaknesses – compounded by the lobby efforts of the construction industry – play a large part in preventing it from happening.

The structure of the energy industry compounds these problems. In a liberalised electricity market, it is far more difficult than in a publicly owned system to negotiate ‘demand side management’ – a bargain struck with the largest industrial users to restrict their usage at peak hours for domestic consumption. On this point, it is Brussels rather than Westminster where the battle needs to be fought to regain public control (not simply ownership) of electricity as a public good.

Ultimately, though, the UK’s energy dilemma is about far more than the choice between one technology or another. These are not shifts that will be achieved by personal footprint counting. Nor will they be achieved by polite pressure on the coalition government – although some policies, such as ‘emissions performance standards’ on power producers (a far more effective means of limiting fossil-fuel emissions than carbon markets or taxes) are certainly worth pursuing. Rather, we will need to focus on how to achieve systemic changes in how goods are produced, traded and consumed. This may sound utopian, but it merely asks that we consider how the energy transitions of the past – from wood to coal and oil – have affected how goods are valued and produced, and apply those lessons to the creation of a world beyond fossil fuels and nuclear power.

The new laws mean opening more rainforest to private corporations, a move which the government has said is in the ‘national interest’. This was an excuse for its violent military reaction against the indigenous protesters. The government, however, did not count on the strength of the resistance of the indigenous peoples. Despite the deaths of more than 50 people in clashes (according to indigenous leaders), they have stood firm and forced the resignation of the prime minister – and a presidential pledge to repeal the new laws.

Half of Peru

When people think of the Amazon, they think of Brazil, but more than half of Peru’s territory is covered by the Amazon rainforest – home to 65 ethnic groups, 14 linguistic families and diverse ways of living. Sadly, it has also become home to oil, mining and gas companies extracting the rainforest’s natural resources. Excessive water and soil pollution, the resulting local health problems and the overlap of concession lands with natural protected areas are some of the problems Peru’s indigenous peoples confront daily.

The Amazon boasts the greatest biological diversity in the world. It generates an estimated 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water. It is crucial for maintaining the climate as it regulates atmospheric gases and stabilises rainfall; it protects against desertification and serves numerous other ecological functions.

And yet, in the last four years, the area designated for oil and gas concessions has increased from about 15 per cent to 70 per cent. In April 2009, PeruPetro, the country’s national oil-licensing agency, signed contracts with international oil companies for 15 Amazonian ‘blocks’ of land.

According to a report from the Peruvian environmental organisation Derecho Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Gamboa Balbín, 2007) there are also 24 blocks of hydrocarbon extraction that overlap with indigenous land. The Spanish multinational Repsol YPF and the Brazilian company Petrobrás are operating in parts of two Matsiguenga communal reserves; the US companies Hunt Oil and Burlington are extracting fossil fuels in the Amarakaeri communal reserve and the Pucacuro reserved zone, respectively.

Such concentrated and continuous investment in dirty industries in the Amazon basin stands in complete contradiction to what investor countries, and the Peruvian government itself, should be doing to mitigate the climate crisis. They are, without doubt, aware that the oil-extraction process releases toxic by-products into local rivers, and broken pipelines and leakage result in oil spillage. In addition, the construction of roads and oil sites opens lands to land developers.

In many cases, oil and gas extraction also go hand-in-hand with corruption. Last year, a scandal revealed that some of the highest-level officials from PeruPetro and the government were soliciting bribes from a Norwegian oil company in exchange for fossil fuel concessions on indigenous territories.
While a handful of people are making a fortune from oil and gas, it is notable that there is barely any state presence or any significant investment in the areas populated by the indigenous peoples. Yet they’re the ones who bear the real burden of fossil fuel consumption. It was Alberto Fujimori, Peruvian president from the 1990s, who kick-started the neoliberal agenda in the country. Successive leaders, both the former head of state Alejandro Toledo and the current president Alan García have fully embraced it. All three governments have wilfully failed to deal with the complexities of the Amazon. While scientists are emphasising its importance as the front line in the battle against catastrophic climate change, the Peruvian government is selling off the forest for fossil fuel extraction.

Intensified conflicts

Peru is just one of many countries now in conflict with its indigenous people over natural resources. Different parts of Africa, Latin America, Asia and North America are also experiencing intensified conflicts over land rights and access to natural resources – which may mark the Rubicon for a model of unsustainable extractive capitalism for the benefit of a few.

Ironically, the global climate negotiations are threatening the indigenous peoples’ way of life by seeking to expand the carbon market and to make the rainforest part of this market-based scheme. The fact that many indigenous peoples have no titles to the land they have lived on for centuries makes them an easy target and vulnerable to displacement. This not only threatens their rights and the Amazon itself, but also means that the last vestiges of an ancient way of living in harmony with nature are being destroyed. This is worth defending, not least for helping the world understand what is involved in moving to a non-carbon economy.

The Amazon is at great risk. Oil and gas companies working in the rainforest have to take much more responsibility for climate change than they do now. Their operations contribute to deforestation through the construction of roads, pipelines, and oil platforms; they cause pollution through oil extraction and transportation; and they are very much responsible for the excessive accumulation of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.

Companies and governments in the North have accumulated a climate debt with the South. Now, it is payback time. A start would be for the North to stop extracting fossil fuels from the ground – and start investing in clean, community-led and renewable energy.

Joanna Cabello is a researcher with Carbon Trade Watch, a project of the Transnational Institute

Among the broad international network of those pledging solidarity with the people of Ogoniland, the most prominent are to be found more than 3,000 miles away, on a remote stretch of Ireland’s western coast. Here, the community of Erris in County Mayo is engaged in its own long-running struggle with Shell.

If Dutch-British owned Shell and its Norwegian partner Statoil have their way, a high-pressure pipeline will transport gas from the Corrib field 60 miles offshore, through Broadhaven Bay and on-land to a new £545 million refinery at Bellanboy. The issue gained international attention in September when retired school teacher and local resident, Maura Harrington, undertook a ten-day hunger strike to force a pipeline-laying ship, the Solitaire, out of Irish waters. Work had begun on the pipeline despite its on-land route not having been agreed.

Harrington explains: ‘My argument for taking this action was based on the primacy of place, encompassing the health and safety of people here, the environment, the culture. This place had to be defended whatever it took – it is a place worth fighting and dying for.’

And the Solitaire did leave, following ‘technical faults’, with Shell denying that protests in support of Harrington had influenced its decision.

Problems in the pipeline

It was a dramatic chapter in a story that stretches back to October 1996, when the Corrib field was discovered by Enterprise Energy Ireland (EEI). It was not until August 2001 that serious steps were taken towards its exploitation, when Mayo council granted EEI planning permission for a pipeline and onshore refinery. This provoked the first of many appeals to An Bord Pleanála (the Irish government’s planning appeals authority) from residents. The hearings became the second longest in the board’s history, and in April 2003 the decision was overturned.

After EEI’s transformation into Shell E&P Ireland in April 2002, however, a new application was submitted. Opposition from residents was fierce, especially over safety concerns. Because the gas would be processed on-land rather than on an offshore rig, as is usual, the pressure inside the proposed pipeline would be four times greater than that of the largest existing Bord Gais pipelines. Furthermore, the pipeline would cross boggy ground prone to landslides. Locals feel the risk of explosion is intolerably high – and Shell’s safety record worldwide does little to inspire confidence.

With the proposed refinery being the largest of its kind in Europe, there are also many potential environment problems. Emissions from four 140-feet tall chimneys will have an adverse affect on the local environment – a catchment area for the region’s water supply – and make a significant contribution to global warming. Meanwhile, waste products (including lead, arsenic and mercury) will be pumped into Broadhaven Bay, an EU Special Area of Conservation. While the development will create some new jobs for locals, others will be lost in the tourist industry if this beauty spot is blemished.

Despite the high price placed on the area by the project, Shell will likely get excellent value for money. In other parts of Europe, the state’s stake in gas and oil fields can be 50 per cent or above, as indeed it was in Ireland until 1987. Decades of ‘investor-friendly’ reforms, however, mean the Irish public will get very little at all in this case: no stake in the Corrib field and no royalties, despite the provision of 100 per cent tax write-offs on development, exploration and operating costs.

Mayo council again granted planning permission for the scheme in 2005, as did An Bord Pleanála. Shell was also granted compulsory purchase orders to deal with people living in its way – the first time such laws had been used in Ireland for a private company. According to Mike Cunningham, a former director of Statoil Exploration (Ireland), ‘No other country in the world has given such favourable terms as Ireland.’

Other avenues of resistance

Let down by the legal process and faced with a government apparently wedded to the pipeline consortium’s interests, opponents explored other avenues of resistance. Most notably, five local men were jailed in June 2005 for defying compulsory purchase orders. The anger aroused by the case of the ‘Rossport Five’ intensified protest and spread it further afield. Large rallies were held in Dublin, pickets of Shell operations across Ireland and the UK proliferated, and blockades of the construction site itself went on around the clock. With publicity growing and the Rossport Five vowing to remain behind bars until they got justice, Shell dropped the case against them in September 2005.

The protests led to further reviews of the project, which in turn revealed serious breaches of the consents given to Shell. Three kilometres of pipeline were dismantled, and construction deferred yet again. To date, with resistance continuing, work on the pipeline has yet to begin.

The effectiveness of the resistance has come from its multifaceted character. Though principally led by locals, it has drawn support from around the world, brought together through the Shell to Sea campaign. The campaign, as the name suggests, seeks primarily to put the development offshore, but also challenges its environmental and economic shortfalls. Shell to Sea has remained non-aligned with any particular party or group, and in doing so has drawn everyone from the Socialist Workers Party to the Woodland League under its umbrella.

Solidarity campaigners from outside the region have a permanent presence in the community using a donated house and land. One Manchester-based campaigner, Amy Thompson, who spent time there during the period of Maura Harrington’s hunger strike, described ‘an intense level of cooperation between solidarity activists and locals in carrying out actions’.

While ‘tactical differences’ sometimes became apparent, Thompson claims the interaction was extremely fruitful. ‘It’s great to see the diversity of tactics and everyone working so well together. Activists often talk about “networking” their campaigns with “the locals” – but here everyone’s actually physically fighting together to defend the land … it was something I’d never seen before, and very inspiring.’ Maura Harrington echoes this: ‘The relationship is symbiotic. There is a lot to learn by both sides, from both sides, and the people living here totally appreciate it, so there isn’t really a them and us anymore.’

Not giving in

Links have also been made with those struggling against Shell in the Niger Delta. Ken Saro-Wiwa’s brother, Dr Owens Wiwa, attended the Rossport Five’s trial, saying that their courage ‘gives hope to the African people … to see that Shell can be made to back down … it is being watched with interest by many involved in similar situations.’ In February, a delegation from Rossport will be travelling to New York for a case brought against Shell for its complicity in human rights abuses in the Niger Delta. Shell to Sea spokesperson Terence Conway hopes to attend. ‘The lesson we’ve learned from the Ogoni is not to give in no matter how impossible it seems, no matter what the odds.’

The global networks that the Shell to Sea campaign has established are essential, as James Marriot of ecological campaign group Platform stresses: ‘They work in the opposite direction to companies like Shell, which try to compartmentalise everything and separate problems in one part of the world from the company as a whole. To connect things up like this puts into question the entire institution.’ The damage done to the Shell brand – a brand eager to lose its planet trashing, community wrecking reputation – may be more severe than the escalating costs of the delays.

Also called into question by the campaign is the relationship between the state and big business in a country that has gone further than most in making life easy for multinational investors. The government reaction has been predictably heavy handed. Terence Conway describes the police as having been given ‘carte blanche’ to disrupt protests: ‘They have done everything possible to provoke people, including targeted arrests to discredit us in the media. It’s one thing to give Shell all our resources, but when they send in the police, basically as Shell thugs, that tells you of the collusion.’

Nonetheless, with the pipeline route – announced in April this year – said to ‘literally cut through the heart of our community’, Shell to Sea has vowed to continue its campaign. Things are quiet for now as construction work winds down for the winter, but whatever Shell decides to do come the spring, it’s going to face a fight.

n Get involved
www.corribsos.com
(the Shell to Sea campaign website)
www.remembersarowiwa.com
www.platformlondon.org

Concern can now be heard across the political spectrum. But has it resulted in a policy rethink?

In the UK and EU, at least, the answer is a qualified yes. The UK government is now considering a delay to its target of 5 per cent agrofuel use from 2011 to 2014. But the renewable transport fuel obligation – which came into force last April – will still award £550 million per year to agribusiness, according to a recent report from the right-wing Policy Exchange think-tank.

The EU has also made some positive revisions to its proposed agrofuels policy. The European Parliament’s industry committee voted on 11 September to keep a 10 per cent target on renewable fuels for transport by 2020, but no longer insists that this be met by agrofuels alone. Its proposed sustainability criteria are now far tougher than expected, with provisions to calculate the impact of indirect land use changes as a result of agrofuel production and to respect international law on land rights and labour conditions. A major review is now scheduled for 2014, which will include an assessment of how agrofuels are affecting food security.

This compromise falls short of the moratorium on agrofuel targets and incentives that many campaigners had called for. But the furious reaction of the European Biodiesel Board and European Bioethanol Fuel Association, the main industry lobby groups, tells its own story: this is an argument that is being won, and a policy that would have encouraged massive agrofuel expansion has been fundamentally altered.

Elsewhere in the world, though, the outlook remains bleak. Spurred on by ‘energy security’ concerns, the US is now the world’s largest agrofuel producer. In his 2007 state of the union address, George Bush set a 10-year goal for 20 per cent of agrofuels in the transport sector. This is unlikely to change if Barack Obama becomes president, since he has long championed bioethanol production. John McCain, who had opposed the subsidies, now supports them too – with one eye on votes in the US corn belt.

Brazil, the world’s second largest producer, and largest exporter, is also expanding its industry. It continues to lobby aggressively for continued subsidies and reduced tariffs at international trade talks.

China, which had planned a 15 per cent target for ‘renewable’ transport fuels by 2020, has started to express doubts. In June 2007, fearing competition with food supplies, the Chinese government put a freeze on new projects to convert wheat production to fuel use. But the country’s agrofuel production capacity continues to expand – with new refineries now looking to Indonesia and Malaysia for palm oil imports.

In India, meanwhile, a new law was passed in September stating that 20 per cent of the country’s liquid fuels should be agrofuels by 2017. The same package proposes to eliminate taxes and duties on biodiesel, and set minimum prices to encourage increased production.

The bottom line is this: although the political backlash has had some effects, global agrofuel production is still expanding. According to the UN Environment Programme, financing for agrofuels production grew by 16 per cent to $16.7 billion in 2007 – although this marks a significant slowdown from the equivalent 200 per cent growth in 2006, largely as a result of concerns about food supplies.

Huge new agrofuel plants continue to be constructed. The world’s largest biodiesel refinery, which will process 800,000 tonnes a year, will be opened by the Finnish company Neste Oil in Singapore in 2010. This will be joined by a similar-sized refinery in Rotterdam by 2011. World production may not double by 2012, as the International Energy Agency predicted in 2007, but it looks a good bet to double by 2030, as the US Energy Information Administration recently said.

Campaigning can force changes, as the EU debate has shown. But we are still a long way from winning the battle against the unsustainable industrial production of fuel from crops.

Some victories have already been chalked up. When we started to campaign against the EU’s 10 per cent target for agrofuels in transport by 2020, it seemed unwinnable. Activists pointed out that turning crops into fuel would increase food prices, exacerbating poverty and even resulting in starvation. A World Bank report leaked in July backed this up – finding that up to three-quarters of recent food price rises can be explained by the switch to agrofuels.

Other scientific studies have shown that deforestation caused (directly or indirectly) by agrofuels means that they are actually damaging the climate. In response, the European Parliament environment committee has now recommended that the 10 per cent target be dropped. The UK government’s Gallagher report, released in early July, also found the introduction of agrofuels should be ‘significantly slowed’.

Yet look elsewhere and the picture is decidedly more mixed. On the face of it, the UK renewable energy strategy (RES) was also a victory. ‘The government has at last begun to take renewables seriously,’ concluded George Monbiot. And, indeed, it contains many positive proposals, ranging from renewable energy for heating to the promotion of electric cars.

Yet delving further into the details reveals a murkier picture. The most remarkable point is that the RES separates out any investment in renewable energy from the issue of reducing emissions from the power sector. These are supposed to be dealt with by the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS), but there is strong evidence that it doesn’t work.

The idea is that the ETS places a ‘cap’ on emissions. Yet in the first phase of the scheme, corporate lobbying resulted in these caps being set so high that they did not actually cap anything. Even if this is corrected, the ETS still offers companies numerous ways to reduce emissions ‘on paper’ without closing fossil fuel plants.

In other words, the RES offers an approach whereby investment in renewable energy will be promoted alongside further investment in coal and nuclear power (with seven new coal plants and ‘at least’ eight new nuclear plants planned). In this framework, the whole point of the exercise is lost. Renewables are being promoted as a supplement to coal and nuclear, a ‘green goldrush’ that has more to do with capital accumulation than a transition to a post-carbon economy.

The problem is then compounded by suggestions that ‘domestic’ reductions might be met from projects elsewhere in the world, largely the global South. In essence, this suggests that the UK can meet the EU’s target of 20 per cent of renewables by 2020 through investments in schemes elsewhere – weakening the pressure that the target might otherwise impose for a reduction in power output from fossil fuel sources.

Yet wind farms off the coast of Scotland are not the same as wind farms in Maharastra, India – where large-scale renewable investments have already resulted in the appropriation of common land used for farming, without even providing local residents with electricity. Counting investment in such projects towards domestic targets is another form of offsetting – making the global South pay for over-consumption in the North.

It also provides a useful complement to industrial outsourcing. In effect, these renewables investments can be used to power factories that have relocated from the UK, driving a race to the bottom on labour conditions and wages, while at the same time artificially lowering UK emissions figures. Already, about a quarter of emissions in China are actually ‘exported carbon’ (according to a 2004 calculation by the Tyndall Centre) – generated in the making of products for export back to the North. It is worth recalling such figures when the G8 tries to hold industrialising countries like China and India responsible for the continued rise in global emissions.

At the G8 Summit the UK pledged funds towards a World Bank ‘clean investment fund’, which will promote investments in ‘clean coal’, as well as reintroducing the ‘conditional loans’ that, post-Seattle, global justice activists successfully discredited as holding the South to ransom.

It is hard to conclude from all this that we are winning. But what it points to is the need for a carbon movement that emphasises the repayment of our ecological debt to the South, and one that places climate justice at its heart.

Oscar Reyes

This is just a taste of the latest energy-related news, signalling a profound change in how all of us, in the United Kingdom, the United States and around the world, are going to live – trends that, so far as anyone can predict, will become more pronounced as energy supplies dwindle and the struggle over their allocation intensifies.

Energy of all sorts was once abundant, making possible the worldwide economic expansion of the past six decades. This expansion benefited the US most of all, along with its ‘first world’ allies in Europe and the Pacific. Recently, however, a select group of former ‘third world’ countries – China and India in particular – have sought to participate in this energy bonanza by industrialising their economies and selling a wide range of goods to international markets. This, in turn, has created an unprecedented spurt in global energy consumption – an increase of 47 per cent in the past 20 years alone, according to the US Department of Energy.

A new world energy order

An increase this huge would not be a matter of deep anxiety if the world’s energy suppliers were capable of producing all the additional fuels needed. Instead, we face the frightening reality of a marked slowdown in the development of global energy supplies just as demand is rising precipitously. These supplies are not actually running out – although that will occur sooner or later – but they are not growing fast enough to satisfy soaring demand. The combination of rising demand, powerful new consumers and the contraction of supply is demolishing the energy-abundant world most of us are familiar with and in its place creating a new world energy order.

This new order will be characterised not only by fierce competition for dwindling stocks of oil, natural gas, coal and uranium, but also by a tidal shift in power and wealth from energy-deficit states such as China, Japan, and the United States to energy-surplus states such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In the process, the lives of everyone on the planet will be affected in one way or another – with poor and middle-class consumers in the energy-deficit states experiencing the harshest effects.

There are five key trends in this new world order that will alter life on this planet.

1. Intense competition between older and newer economic powers for the available supplies of energy

Until very recently, the mature industrial powers of Europe, Asia and North America consumed the lion’s share of world energy supply, leaving the dregs for the developing world. As recently as 1990, the members of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of the world’s richest nations, consumed approximately 57 per cent of world energy, and the Soviet bloc 14 per cent. Only 29 per cent was left for the entire developing world, which has about three-quarters of the world’s population.

But that ratio is now changing. With strong economic growth in the developing countries, they are consuming a greater proportion of the world’s energy output. By 2010, the developing nations’ share of global energy use is expected to reach 40 per cent; and if current trends persist their share will reach 47 per cent by 2030.

China, where a quarter of the world’s population lives, plays a critical role in all this. Although China accounted for only 8 per cent of world energy consumption in 1990, its rate of demand is rising so rapidly that it is expected to consume 17 per cent of world energy by 2015 and 20 per cent by 2025 – by which time, if current trends continue, it will have overtaken the US as the world’s leading consumer. India, which in 2004 accounted for 3.4 per cent of world energy use, is projected to reach 4.4 per cent by 2025. Consumption in other rapidly industrialising nations, such as Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Turkey, is expected to climb as well.

To satisfy their growing requirements, these rising economic dynamos will have to compete with the mature powers for access to the world’s remaining untapped reserves of exportable energy. In many cases, these were acquired long ago by the private energy firms of the mature powers – companies such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Total and Royal Dutch Shell – and are now controlled by the national oil companies (NOCs) of the major supplying nations. Of necessity, the new contenders for energy have developed a potent strategy for competing with the western ‘majors’: they have created state-owned companies of their own and made strategic alliances with the NOCs that now control vast oil and gas reserves in key producing nations.

China’s Sinopec, for example, has established a strategic alliance with Saudi Aramco, the nationalised giant that was once owned by Chevron and Exxon Mobil, to explore for natural gas in eastern Saudi Arabia and market Saudi crude oil in China. Likewise, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) will collaborate with Gazprom, the mammoth Russian state-controlled natural gas behemoth, to build pipelines and deliver Russian gas to China. Several of these state-owned firms, including CNPC and India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, will collaborate with Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PdVSA) to develop the extra-heavy crude of the Orinoco belt that was once produced by Chevron. Many other such alliances have been formed or are under discussion, suggesting a new stage of energy competition in which the advantage long enjoyed by the western majors has been eroded by vigorous, state-backed upstarts from the developing world.

2. The insufficiency of primary energy supplies

The capacity of the global energy industry to satisfy demand is shrinking. By all accounts, the global supply of oil will expand for another half-decade before reaching a peak level of output and beginning to decline, while supplies of natural gas, coal and uranium will probably continue to grow for another decade or two before reaching their peak and commencing their own inevitable declines. In the meantime, global supplies will prove incapable of reaching the levels needed to meet demand.

Take oil. The US Department of Energy claims that world oil demand, expected to reach 117.6 million barrels per day in 2030, will be matched by a global supply that – miracle of miracles – will hit exactly 117.7 million barrels (including liquids derived from allied substances such as natural gas and Canadian tar sands) at the same time. Most energy professionals, however, consider this supply estimate highly unrealistic.

‘One hundred million barrels [per day] is now in my view an optimistic case,’ the CEO of Total, Christophe de Margerie, told a London oil conference in October 2007. ‘It is not my view; it is the industry view, or the view of those who like to speak clearly, honestly, and [are] not just trying to please people.’

Similarly, the authors of the Medium-Term Oil Market Report for 2008-2012, published in July 2007 by the International Energy Agency, an affiliate of the OECD, concluded that world oil output might rise as high as 96 million barrels per day by 2012, but was unlikely to go much beyond that level as older fields went into decline and a dearth of new discoveries made future growth impossible.

Daily business-page headlines point to a matrix of clashing trends: demand will continue to grow as hundred of millions of newly-affluent Chinese and Indian consumers line up to purchase their first automobiles; key older fields such as Ghawar in Saudi Arabia and Canterell in Mexico are in decline or expected to be so soon; the rate of new oilfield discoveries proves disappointing year after year. We can expect that oil shortages and high prices will prove a constant source of economic hardship.

The picture for other fuels is slightly better – but only just. Even if global output of natural gas, coal and uranium will continue to grow after the peaking of oil, the inevitable contraction of petroleum supplies will produce a corresponding increase in demand for these fuels, and so they will be depleted at an ever-increasing rate – moving their own peak closer and increasing their cost.

3. The painfully slow development of alternatives

It has long been evident that new sources of energy are needed to compensate for the disappearance of existing fuels, and to slow the buildup of climate-changing ‘greenhouse gases’. Wind and solar power have gained a foothold in some areas and ethanol provides a small but growing percentage of the world’s transportation fuel. Moreover, a number of other innovative energy solutions have been developed and tested in university and corporate laboratories. But these alternatives, which contribute only a tiny proportion of the world’s fuel supply, are simply not being developed fast enough to avert the multifaceted global energy catastrophe that lies ahead.

According to the US Department of Energy, renewable fuels, including wind, solar, biofuels, and hydropower, along with ‘traditional’ fuels such as firewood and animal dung, accounted for just 7.4 per cent of world energy use in 2004; biofuels added another 0.3 per cent. Meanwhile, fossil fuels – oil, coal, and natural gas – supplied 86 per cent of world energy, nuclear power another 6 per cent. Based on current rates of development and investment, the department offers the dismal projection that fossil fuels will still account for exactly the same share of world energy in 2030 as in 2004: 86 per cent. The expected increase in the share claimed by renewables and biofuels is so tiny as to be meaningless.

For global warming, the implications are nothing short of catastrophic. Increasing reliance on coal (especially in China, India and the US) means that global emissions of carbon dioxide are projected to rise by 59 per cent over the next quarter-century, from 26.9 billion metric tons in 2004 to 42.9 billion in 2030. The meaning of this is simple: if these figures hold, there is no hope of averting the worst effects of climate change.

When it comes to global energy supplies, the implications are nearly as dire. To meet soaring energy demand, we would need a massive influx of alternative fuels, which in turn would require investment in the trillions of dollars to ensure that the most promising options move from the laboratory to full-scale commercial production. But that is not on the cards. Instead, the major energy firms (backed by lavish US government subsidies and tax breaks) are putting most of their profits from rising energy prices into share buy-back schemes and vastly expensive (and environmentally questionable) schemes to drill for oil and gas in Alaska and the deep, dangerous waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic and the Atlantic. The result? A little more oil and gas at exorbitant prices – with accompanying ecological damage – while non-petroleum alternatives limp along at a snail’s pace.

4. A steady migration of power and wealth from the energy-deficit to the energy-surplus nations

There are a few countries – perhaps a dozen altogether – that possess enough oil, gas, coal and uranium (or some combination thereof) to meet their own energy needs and provide a significant surplus for export. These few privileged states will be able to extract increasingly beneficial terms from the much wider pool of energy-deficit nations dependent on them for vital supplies of energy. This will result in growing mountains of petrodollars being accumulated by the leading oil producers, and increasingly it will mean political and military concessions.

In the case of oil and natural gas, the number of major energy-surplus states can be counted on two hands. Ten states possess 82.2 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves. In order of importance, they are: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Venezuela, Russia, Libya, Kazakhstan and Nigeria. The possession of natural gas is even more concentrated. Three countries – Russia, Iran, and Qatar – harbour an astonishing 55.8 per cent of the world supply. All of these countries export more oil and gas than they consume, and so are in the enviable position of being able to cash in on the dramatic rise in energy prices and extract from potential customers whatever political concessions they deem essential.

The transfer of wealth is already mind-boggling. The oil-exporting countries collected an estimated $970 billion from the importing countries in 2006; the take for 2007, when finally calculated, is expected to be far greater. A substantial fraction of these dollars, yen and euros have been deposited in sovereign-wealth funds (SWFs), the giant investment accounts established by the oil states and deployed for the acquisition of valuable assets around the world. In recent months, the Persian Gulf SWFs have been taking advantage of the financial crisis in the US to purchase large stakes in strategic sectors of its economy.

In November 2007, for example, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) acquired a $7.5 billion stake in Citigroup, America’s largest bank holding company. In January 2008, Citigroup sold an even larger share, worth $12.5 billion, to the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) and several other Middle Eastern investors, including Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. The managers of ADIA and KIA insist that they do not intend to use their newly-acquired stakes in Citigroup and other US banks and corporations to influence US economic or foreign policy, but it is hard to imagine that a shift of this magnitude – which can only gain momentum in the years ahead – will not translate into political leverage.

In the case of Russia – which has risen from the ashes of the former Soviet Union as the world’s first energy superpower – it already has. Russia is now the world’s leading supplier of natural gas, its second largest supplier of oil and is a major producer of coal and uranium. Though many of these assets were briefly privatised during the reign of Boris Yeltsin, most were brought back under state control during the presidency of Vladimir Putin (in some cases, by questionable legal means). Putin then used these assets in efforts to extract political and economic concessions from former Soviet republics that were reliant on Russia for the bulk of their oil and gas supplies. The EU countries sometimes expressed dismay at these tactics – but they, too, are significantly dependent on Russian oil and gas, and so have learned to mute their protests and otherwise accommodate to growing Russian control over Eurasian energy flows.

In extending Russia’s energy power throughout Eurasia, Putin usually relied on Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas behemoth that provides about a quarter of OECD Europe’s gas supply. Gazprom is also Russia’s leading source of foreign earnings and its top source of government income. For years, the chairman of Gazprom was a close political ally of Putin’s from St Petersburg, Dmitri Medvedev. When obliged to step down as president under a constitutional ban on serving more than two consecutive terms, Putin picked Medvedev to succeed him. In a sense, Gazprom and the Russian state have become one and the same, and Russia itself has emerged as a model for the new energy world order.

5. A growing risk of conflict

Throughout human history, major shifts in economic and political power on this scale have normally been accompanied by violence – in some cases, protracted violent upheavals. Either the states at the pinnacle of power have fought to prevent the loss of their privileged status to others, or challengers have fought to topple those at the top of the heap.

Will this happen now? Will energy-deficit nations launch campaigns to wrest the oil and gas reserves of the surplus states from their control – the Bush administration’s war in Iraq might already be thought of one such attempt – or to eliminate competitors among their deficit-state rivals?

Certainly there are many reasons to argue against such scenarios. The high costs and risks of modern warfare are well known, and there is a widespread perception that energy problems can best be solved through economic means. Nevertheless, the major powers are employing military means in their efforts to gain advantage in the global struggle over energy, and no one should be deluded on the subject. These endeavours could easily lead to unintended escalation and conflict.

One conspicuous use of military means in the pursuit of energy is the regular transfer of arms and military support services by the major energy-importing states to their principal suppliers. Both the US and China, for example, have stepped up their deliveries of arms and equipment to oil-producing states such as Angola, Nigeria and Sudan, and, in the Caspian Sea basin, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The US has placed particular emphasis on suppressing the armed insurgency in the vital Niger Delta region of Nigeria, where most of the country’s onshore oil is produced. Beijing has emphasised arms aid to Sudan, where Chinese-led oil operations are threatened by insurgencies in both the south and Darfur.

Russia is also using arms transfers as a instrument in its efforts to gain influence in the major oil and gas producing regions, especially the Caspian Sea basin and the Persian Gulf. Its urge is not is not to procure energy for its own domestic use, but rather to dominate the flow of energy to others. In particular, Moscow seeks a monopoly on the transportation of central Asian gas to Europe via Gazprom’s vast pipeline network; it also wants to tap into Iran’s mammoth gas fields, further cementing Russia’s control over the trade in natural gas.

The danger, of course, is that such endeavours, multiplied over time, will provoke local arms races in these areas, exacerbate regional tensions, and increase the danger of great-power involvement in any local conflicts that do erupt. History has all too many examples of such miscalculations leading to wars that spiral out of control: think of the years leading up to the first world war.

What this adds up to is simple and sobering: the end of the world as we’ve known it. In the new, energy-centric world we have all now entered, the price of oil will dominate our lives and power will reside in the hands of those who control its global distribution.

In this new world, energy will govern our lives on a daily basis. It will determine when, and for what purposes, we use our cars; how high (or low) to turn our thermostats; when, where, or even if, to travel; what foods to eat (given that the price of producing and distributing many meats and vegetables is profoundly affected by the cost of oil and the allure of growing crops for ethanol); for some, where to live; for others, what business to engage in; and, for all of us, when and under what circumstances to go to war or to avoid foreign entanglements that could end in war.

This leads to a final observation: The most pressing decision facing the next president of the United States (along with the leaders of other major energy-consuming nations) may be how best to accelerate the transition from a fossil-fuel-based energy system to a system based on climate-friendly energy alternatives.

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of several books, including Resource Wars, Blood and Oil, and, most recently, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: the new geopolitics of energy (Oneworld, £16.99)

The Iraqi council of ministers has approved a draft Hydrocarbon Law, which will radically restructure the oil industry if passed by the Iraqi parliament. It will enable Iraqi oil to be developed by foreign oil companies under long-term exploration and production agreements, a sanitised term for production sharing agreements (PSAs).

These grant companies extremely generous shares of oil profits on terms fixed for up to 30 years, which the Iraqi state will be unable to alter. Over the lifetime of these contracts it is likely to lose a considerable proportion of its potential revenue earnings and its oil resources will be exhausted in a rush by oil companies to exploit the opportunities created by military intervention. Any new domestic laws that might affect the companies’ profits will not apply to them. The key economic decisions will be placed out of the hands of future Iraqi governments and it will be difficult for Iraq to rehabilitate and develop its own national oil industry. An occupation, it is clear, does not always rely on troops.

Most ingeniously, the PSA contracts hide what is essentially a form of privatisation. The state retains ownership of the oil in a formal sense, yet the oil companies control all decisions regarding its production, development and sale. This is particularly useful in Iraq, where hostility to privatisation runs deep. This hostility is why the Iraqi public has been denied any role in making the key decisions about the future of the Iraqi oil industry.

Instead, policy has been engineered by those it will benefit. Making maximum use of the war and occupation, the US and UK governments, nine foreign oil companies, the IMF and powerful Iraqi elites have pushed the PSA contracts onto the occupation-friendly Iraqi government. Former oil company executives have served as advisers in the Coalition Provisional Authority, helping develop the proposals for introducing PSAs. Meanwhile, the International Tax and Investment Centre (a corporate lobby firm whose board of directors conveniently includes representatives from the big oil companies) has been busy promoting the use of PSAs to the Iraqis, with assistance from the British government.

But the occupying powers and the oil companies do not want this to look like an imperialist imposition, which would be open to subsequent international legal challenge. They need an Iraqi Hydrocarbon Law to create the impression that these contracts have been through a sovereign and democratic political process. Such a law has been crafted in secret in consultation with the oil companies, the US and UK governments, and the IMF, since July 2006. The Iraqi parliamentarians saw the law for the first time only after it was leaked earlier this year. They and Iraqi civil society groups had asked to see a draft, but they were told it did not exist.

The pressure hasn’t subsided now that the law needs to be ‘democratically’ voted for. Prime Minister Al-Malaki is reportedly afraid that the US will withdraw its support for his premiership, effectively ousting him from power, if the law is not passed before 30 May. Bush and the US Congress have made passing the law a ‘benchmark’ for their continued support to Al-Maliki. The Iraqi people face the forced loss of political and economic sovereignty over their most precious natural resource. This has been done in the name, but at the expense, of Iraqi democracy and sovereignty.

That sovereignty has not been lost yet, however. Iraqi oil workers have been fiercely resisting the handover of Iraq’s oil to multinational corporations. Ultimately they may stop production, halt exports and trigger a political crisis even inside the current political establishment. At a meeting last December the representatives of the five main union federations in Iraq denounced PSAs, calling the government’s attempts to privatise Iraqi oil through them ‘a red line that may not be crossed’.

Above all, the workers demand proper consultation in a normal atmosphere. They want their vital industry supported rather than run down and made ripe for international corporate handover, and they want the draft law drastically revised and postponed until after occupation troops have left the country and a truly sovereign decision is possible. Oil workers have stopped production before, securing higher wages and better conditions as a result, and they have threatened to take action over the oil law. The repression they will face is likely to be brutal, but the consequences of any such repression will also be incalculable for those who attempt it.Becca Fisher is Iraq researcher at Corporate Watch and a member of the Hands Off Iraqi Oil Coalition, formed to offer solidarity in opposing the proposed law and support Iraqi efforts to secure sovereign control over their oil industry.