Daphne Wysham
“I’ve never followed a vice presidential candidate before,” Daphne Wysham observed as she took the podium. “This is going to be a tough one.” Wysham, who was replacing Annie Brisibe on the panel, provided some context for Brisibe’s absence and then a few more comments about the protest by women in the Niger Delta in the summer of 2002. “In terms of oil spills,” Wysham explained, “the Niger Delta has suffered ten times the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez. Now the Exxon Valdez oil spill cost us – what? $10 billion or so? – to clean up. So, if the people of the Delta were to get their due, these oil companies would be spending about $100 billion. Now, what were these women asking for when they took over the oil platforms? They were asking for a few jobs, for clinics, for health care, for education. And what I would suggest is that we need to get them to be a little more ambitious and maybe take these oil companies to court and get them to clean up. Not only to clean up, but to compensate them for decades of lost livelihoods, of impoverishment, and of their children being malnourished as a result of all of the pollution in the Delta.”
Wysham then shifted her focus to the history of the structural arrangements that govern the extraction of fossil fuels by multinational corporations around the globe, corporations whose work is often facilitated by the institutions of economic globalization. Pointing to the then impending war with Iraq (the conference took place in February 2003), Wysham cast a historical look back to the late 1970s when the first OPEC oil crisis resulted in consumers queuing up in long lines for hours to buy gasoline. As a consequence of this experience, one of the first things Ronald Reagan did, when he became president in 1980, was (through the Treasury Department) to instruct the World Bank to begin investing in oil and gas. “We have up on our Web site . . . documents that were leaked to us from the Treasury Department. The Treasury writes: ‘We [the United States] would be suspect, as the home to the largest oil companies in the world, if we push this agenda, namely, for non-OPEC countries to begin to open up their markets for western consumers. We would be suspect.’ The United States would be; therefore, we need the World Bank to press this agenda. The World Bank began, not only investing in oil and gas in countries that were outside of . . . OPEC . . ., but also they began pushing the agenda . . . of privatization and deregulation. Trying to get the oil companies out of the hands of the state governments. And it was no surprise, then, that we had what we called the Enron phenomenon.
“Everybody heard about Enron’s collapse in the United States and all of the travesties that occurred as a result . . . . People losing their pensions, losing their jobs. The California energy crisis. Well, thanks to the World Bank and other public funds – [the] $7 billion that they gave to Enron over the last decade around the globe for Enron to operate in over 24 countries – Enron was able to pull California on the Dominican Republic, for example. Where they came in and managed to privatize the power sector in the Dominican Republic. Jacked up the rates, claiming that there was a power shortage. When there was rioting in the streets, people were shot and killed. Eight people were killed in the Dominican Republic, including an eight-year-old boy. This went on over and over again around the world, basically at the behest of the World Bank and the IMF. These institutions that are pushing this agenda of greater access for multinational corporations, many of them [were] virtually unknown until they got on the bankroll of the World Bank and the IMF.
“Like Enron, like AES. AES Corporation was actually on the verge of bankruptcy here in this country because they had been kicked out of communities in California and Maine for violating U.S. environmental regulations. They managed, through getting money from the World Bank, to become one of the largest coal-fire power producers in the world.
“So in terms of the actual money that has been invested by the World Bank in oil, gas and coal, we calculated that over the last ten years the World Bank has invested $25 billion in fossil fuels. And we calculated the greenhouse gas emissions that would be emitted from those projects. And we came up with the staggering figure of 46.7 billion tons of CO2. Now, what does that mean? Every year the manmade greenhouse gas emissions are roughly 24 billion tons. So over ten years, the World Bank has financed the equivalent of almost two [years’ worth of] all global greenhouse gas emissions. One institution. One bank based in Washington, DC, is responsible for two years’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions over a ten-year time span.
“[Meanwhile,] OPIC and Ex-Im – Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the U.S. Export/Import Bank – over the same time period financed 35 billion [tons]. Again, not quite as high in terms of greenhouse gas emissions but equivalent to about two-thirds of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions; every year [these] are financed abroad by OPIC and Ex-Im.
“So not only is the U.S. the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. We also, with our taxpayer money, are the largest financier of fossil fuel projects in the world. The unfortunate reality is that at the same time as the World Bank is financing these fossil fuel projects to the tune of $25 billion, they are financing renewable projects which include geothermal and a few solar – but it’s mostly geothermal and some waste energy projects to the tune of about $1 billion over the past decade.”
Having drawn a portrait of the costliness of these various initiatives, Wysham argued that “we need to make fossil fuels as expensive as possible.” In addition, she urged the audience to consider ways of “denying them the public funds they get from you and me. Not only at the gas pump, but through our tax dollars, through these institutions that are operating around the world.” The costs, she pointed out, are not only at the level of diverted resources and impacts on the global climate. “There are enormous human rights and local environmental impacts in the Niger Delta and all over, wherever the World Bank invests. They don’t even have a human rights policy, so they can’t implement any sort of guidelines to govern their investments overseas. . . . [And] after 9/11, . . . they are trying to get twice as much oil and gas out of the Gulf of Guinea by the year 2015, as they were prior to September 11. The goal is to basically use these institutions like OPIC and Ex-Im as bargaining chips. In other words, if you go along with the IMF structural adjustment packages and all of the other conditionalities that they place on these countries, we will then provide all of this money for your oil and gas sectors.
“And then the U.S., of course, gets enormous returns on that in the form of cheap and continuous flow of oil and gas to U.S. markets. So we’re seeing a rapid escalation in investments from OPIC and Ex-Im and the World Bank in countries like Nigeria, like São Tomé and Príncipe [in the Gulf of Guinea], where they recently discovered offshore oil and gas; like Equatorial Guinea. Angola is being targeted by OPIC for investment. And of course, the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, one of the most controversial pipelines in the world, has got both Ex-Im and OPIC, and the World Bank, invested in that particular project.”
After detailing the complexities of the role of institutions of economic globalization in the efforts by the United States to obtain access to oil and gas resources, Wysham turned her attention to the gender implications of these concerns. “In virtually every developing country women are the energy managers. When I say energy managers, they are the ones who manage the energy for household consumption. They are the ones who gather the fuel wood for cooking. They are the ones who make sure that the house is lit, if possible, or heated, if possible. And yet, most of this investment that I’ve been talking about is focused on a completely different type of energy. It’s energy for extraction and for export. It’s energy for export-oriented industries. Women’s energy needs are all but ignored despite the fact that if you read the literature of the World Bank, over and over again they will talk about these hovels that these women live in and how their children are breathing this really smoky air because they are dependent on fuel wood and crop waste and cow dung for their heating and cooking.
“Nowhere in the actual follow-up studies do you see any data on exactly how effective they were in addressing the energy needs of these women and children. They just sort of put it up there and said, ‘It’s an obvious need and therefore we need to throw billions of dollars at this problem.’ When we keep pressing them on this, it turns out that they spend less than 1 percent of their total energy budget on addressing the needs of the 2 billion rural poor. And that’s where the real energy crisis is. Of course, climate change, one of the consequences of continued rapid consumption of fossil fuel, has enormous implications for women.
“I keep thinking of that photograph of the woman in the tree in Mozambique. I don’t know if you remember that one. The floods. I think she was giving birth in a tree and they had to helicopter her out. Women are walking further and further already for fuel wood. They have less time for things like economic opportunities. Certainly not education. Taking care of their own health or the health of their children. And now, with climate change, we will have an increase in vector-borne diseases. And of course, if women are nutritionally compromised as a result of climate changes that affect crop yields and all of that, then they are more vulnerable to disease. In places like the Niger Delta, then you have the added problem of rising sea water and rising ocean levels that are basically submerging a lot of these communities that have lived at the ocean’s edge for centuries. And a lot of that water is heavily polluted.”
Wysham, like LaDuke, sought to provide the audience with some hope in spite of the dire portrait she had painted. “Now that I’ve laid out some of the problems, I want to talk about some of the solutions and, also, some of the good news. Because despite the fact that we have these enormous institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and the WTO, that once you start working on them and you start analyzing them, you begin to feel like they’ve got control over every aspect of your life, the fact of the matter is, as I think it was the New York Times, which said it a few days ago, there are two superpowers. There is the U.S. and there is global civil society. And I think a couple of weekends ago, when there were these protests all over the world, we showed that global civil society is an enormous superpower to deal with.” Wysham went on to offer a series of examples of some of the local, regional, and broader initiatives that have been making an impact on the current situation:
- A resolution passed in San Francisco, calling for a certain percentage of energy to come from solar power.
- A resolution by the governors of the states in the northeast United States calling for compliance with the Kyoto protocol.
- Initiatives harnessing wind power. Wysham’s statement that, “There are some very exciting wind initiatives in Texas, of all places, where there is also a lot of wind,” drew a wave of laughter from the audience.
- Developing consciousness among U.S. citizens concerning threats to global stability and peace: In response to a recent poll, when asked, “which country poses the greatest danger to world peace? Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or the United States?” 85 percent of Americans who responded answered, “the United States.”
- Continuing protests against the World Bank.
- Global activism against carbon trading, a form of trade that represents “a very alarming development, . . . basically . . . enshrining the right to pollute, as opposed to the right to live free of pollution.”
- Initiatives such as Cities for Peace, which have successfully persuaded over 100 city councils around the country (including Los Angeles and Chicago) to oppose a unilateral attack on Iraq.
- Initiatives to connect activists around the globe, linking indigenous communities and people threatened by gas and coal mining around the world (see the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network Web site).
Wysham closed her presentation with a call to boycott ExxonMobil. “Of all the oil companies, they have made it clear – not only do they not give a damn about Kyoto, [but] they are actively trying to undermine any effort to move the Kyoto protocol forward to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. And [they are] trying to pit the developing world off against the developed world. So, boycott ExxonMobil.”
