U.S. sends mixed message on climate

As Bush calls on developing nations to curb CO2, two federally controlled agencies are enabling them to emit more.

WASHINGTON — At the Group of 8 summit of world leaders in June, President Bush repeated his calls for developing nations to curb their emissions of greenhouse gases. Without their cooperation, he said, drastic measures in the United States to battle climate change would make little sense.

“We all can make major strides, and yet there won’t be a reduction until China and India are participants,” he told reporters.

But just weeks earlier, the U.S. government had pledged to help finance one of the world’s most advanced oil refineries, taking shape in Jamnagar, India. The facility, to be completed by December 2008, will not only produce petroleum products, it will annually emit nearly 9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — the major contributor to global warming — into the atmosphere.
That estimate comes from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which announced $500 million in loan guarantees for the project in May. And those figures do not take into account the emissions from the vehicles that will burn the giant refinery’s gasoline, the planes that will fly on its jet fuel or the stoves that use its propane and kerosene.

The Jamnagar refinery is one of hundreds of fossil-fuel projects built with the help of U.S.-controlled funding agencies. Since 1995, when the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed there was a “discernible human influence” on global warming, the United States has helped finance power plants, liquefied natural gas processors, oil pipelines and the like in more than 40 countries — in effect extending America’s “carbon footprint” well past this nation’s borders.

By calling for developing nations to curb their emissions while simultaneously helping them emit more, “we’re being hypocritical,” said David Waskow, international policy director for the Friends of the Earth environmental group.

Los Angeles Times