BP and the Environment: The Bolivian Connection
06 June 2010
Readers:
I am in the U.S. again this month, for a long mix of work meetings, conference talks, and as much as possible, time with my family and friends. And as anyone here knows, the airwaves are filled with the agonizing story of the BP geyser of oil spewing out of a mile-deep well in the Gulf of Mexico.
As many readers know, BP is an oil conglomerate that has long sought to portray itself as a friend of the environment and the disaster in the Gulf has led many to look behind that public relations curtain and the not-so-gleeful or green reality behind the scenes.
In this post the Democracy Center’s Kylie Benton-Connell takes a look at one of BP’s prized public relations projects in Bolivia – its supposed saving of a South American forest as an offset for its environmental destruction done elsewhere. This is just a first glimpse of a story we’ll be covering in more depth in the weeks ahead.
Jim Shultz
BP and the Environment: The Bolivian Connection
Written by Kylie Benton-Connell
The world is watching with mounting horror as BP fails to contain a six week-long environmental catastrophe off the Southern coast of the U.S. Its Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April, leaving 11 workers dead and oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico – and every attempt to stop the leak has come to naught. One photographer drew a striking comparison with the infamous 1986 Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill in Alaska, saying that if Exxon Valdez was like a heart attack, Deepwater was like cancer, spreading devastation slowly but surely.
Unsurprisingly, this is turning into a public relations nightmare for BP. The most aggressive of all the big oil companies in terms of promoting its image as an environmental leader, several years ago it changed its logo to resemble a green sunflower and proclaimed itself to be going “beyond petroleum.” Activists have long contested this sparkling green image, by drawing attention to the devastating impact of BP’s investment in biofuels on food security, and more recently through protests around BP’s involvement in tar sands development in Canada.
Since the recent spill, people have found creative ways to express their outrage, like “redesigning” the BP logo or filling the Tate Modern (a UK art gallery that receives funding from BP) with black balloons, oil-covered birds and dead fish.
So what does all this have to do with Bolivia?
Companies like BP have extended histories in the country, chasing the massive hydrocarbon wealth that lies underneath Bolivian soil. But more recently, big oil and other polluters have started circling around a new commodity – carbon “offsets” that can be created from Bolivia’s vast swathes of forest.
The concept of carbon offsets is becoming well-known – basically, the idea is that you can compensate for doing something bad for the climate by paying someone else to not do something bad (or under some circumstances, do something ‘good’) for the climate somewhere else. It’s sort of like getting a permit from your parents to blow up your living room because you paid your sister to not set fire to her tree house. When you buy an aeroplane ticket you can now pay several dollars to ‘offset’ the damage that your flight will do to the climate. Often this means funding a project somewhere else in the world to conserve trees, or to burn biomass instead of coal at a power plant, for example.
But the big business in offsets isn’t selling retail to a few Prius-driving consumers in the U.S. or the U.K. It’s industrial polluters, like oil companies and power providers. These companies are looking for cheap ways to generate “carbon credits” which will help to green their image, and (they hope) will count as “emissions reductions” under future climate legislation.
Three of these companies – PacificCorp, American Electric Power and BP – got together in 1996 to fund the Noel-Kempff Climate Action Project. The idea was simple: the consortium teamed up with the Bolivian government, The Nature Conservancy (a U.S. environmental NGO) and Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza (FAN; a Bolivian environmental NGO) to pay to conserve a tract of forest that would otherwise be logged. It was pitched as a win-win-win; a win for local Bolivian communities who would have other sources of income apart from logging jobs, a win for the U.S. companies who could claim they were taking environmental action and gain carbon credits, and a win for the climate, which would have more trees soaking up CO2 than had the project not existed.
However, the project in Bolivia has recently become used as something of a poster-child for what is problematic about forest offsets. A Greenpeace report released in the lead-up to Copenhagen strongly criticised the project, arguing that the partners had radically overestimated its carbon-saving potential. The report also questioned the community impacts, recounting stories such as the purchase – as part of an effort to provide alternative source of income for a community – of a herd of an inappropriate breed of cows, which all died in the climate they were not adapted to (many offset projects have been criticised for impinging in far more disturbing ways on the lives of local people; one example is covered in this short film that links a project in Brazil to the polluting impacts of a BP refinery in Scotland.)
Moreover, since the Gulf oil spill, The Nature Conservancy has come under heavy fire for its associations with BP, which include other collaborations aside from the one in Bolivia, including from their own supporters. Critics question whether such industry-NGO-government ‘partnerships’ are a real way to achieve strong climate outcomes, or merely greenwash.
Of course, these criticisms do not go uncontested. FAN Bolivia published a blistering response to the Greenpeace report, which you can find here. The inclusion of forest offsets in a global agreement on climate change continues to be one of the most controversial debates in the UN process. Supporters argue that giving forests a dollar value in a carbon market is a good way to encourage their preservation, particularly in the global South. Detractors argue that privatising forests and trading them on a carbon market threatens the rights of forest communities, and provides loopholes for polluters big enough to steer a leaking oil tanker through.
You won’t find many people who disagree with the fact that to stop or slow climate change, we have to stop forests being cut down, and that communities in Bolivia (among others) deserve to have options for sustaining their livelihoods through means other than logging. But if preserving these forests means allowing companies like BP to continue their oily business as usual, forest offsets are going to continue to be a tough sell.
22 responses to BP and the Environment: The Bolivian Connection
Spare me the pseudo environmental tears. Instead of pontificating how bad oil is, see if you’ll be able to live without these oil derived products:
Fuels – like gasoline, diesel, propane (many people use propane to heat their homes), heating oil.
Heavy bottoms – like asphalt, bitumen, tar
Petrochemicals – used as a feedstock for many everyday products:
plastic gadgets, tools, bags, toys
candles
clothing (polyester, nylon)
hand lotions
petroleum jelly
perfume
dishwashing liquids
ink
bubble gums
car tires
ammonia
heart valves
and many more
Crude oil is refined and used to make all these products:
Ethane and other short-chain alkanes which are used as fuel
Diesel
Fuel oils
Petrol
Jet fuel
Kerosene
Liquid petroleum gas (LPG)
Natural gas
Alkenes (olefins) which can be manufactured into plastics or other compounds
Lubricants (produces light machine oils, motor oils, and greases, adding viscosity stabilizers as required).
Wax, used in the packaging of frozen foods, among others.
Sulfur or Sulfuric acid. These are a useful industrial materials. Sulfuric acid is usually prepared as the acid precursor oleum, a byproduct of sulfur removal from fuels.
Bulk tar.
Asphalt
Petroleum coke, used in speciality carbon products or as solid fuel.
Paraffin wax
Aromatic petrochemicals to be used as precursors in other chemical production.
Maybe if we didn’t have to use it to fuel our automobiles, we might have some for those other petrol things in the next century.
Some hope that further contamination will stop.
Release date: 07 June 2010
BP today provided an update on developments in the response to the MC252 oil well incident in the Gulf of Mexico.
Subsea Source Control and Containment
The lower marine riser package (LMRP) containment cap, installed on June 3, continues to collect oil and gas flowing from the well and transport them to the Discoverer Enterprise drillship on the surface. On June 5, a total of 10,500 barrels of oil was collected and 22 million standard cubic feet of natural gas was flared. From June 3 through June 5, the volume of oil collected was 16,600 barrels and 32.7 million standard cubic feet of natural gas was flared.
Optimization continues and improvement in oil collection is expected over the next several days. It will be a few days before an assessment can be made as to the success of this containment effort.
This is a complex operation, involving risks and uncertainties, being carried out 5,000 feet under water. The LMRP containment cap never before has been deployed at these depths and conditions, and its efficiency and ability to contain the oil and gas cannot be assured.
The volume of oil captured and gas flared is being updated daily on BP’s website, http://www.bp.com
Read full update in the following link:
http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7062670
great post! I don’t know of FAN Bolivia, but from their website it looks like they are involved in a big bunch of REDD forest offset projects, so would have a (heavily) vested interest in defending and legitimising existing projects: http://www.fan-bo.org/en/cambio-climatico-ud-mitigacion.php
Hopefully DC’s next post will be about the Uncia lynchings and how it’s becoming Bolivia’s unofficial favorite passtime. Not only has the Morales govt decided not to prosecute these primitive savages paid by smugglers, but has instead attacked those who demand an investigation and punishment.
The Bolivian primitive savages have killed four policemen…
The USA primitive savages have probably killed 3 million Arabs
but who cares… they are worthless muslim lives…
Indians?
What Indians? they are arabs from Irak and Afganistan…
and who is next Iran?
What are you talking about?
Great story.
Whatever the damage BP will ultimately cause, it would be a nothing compared to what Evo and his cocaleros have done to the Yungas and Chapare. Is anyone out there tracking cancer rates in these regions?
Am I wrong in believing that BP’s drilling so deep in the ocean was due to the fact that regulations prohibited them from drilling where it was shallower and safer?
It seems hypocritical for environmentalists to be so upset about the oil spill when they are the reason why BP had to drill so far off shore (where it is less-safe) in the first place.
And also, I agree with the first post: we get so much from oil. I would rather have oil spewing out into the ocean than remain so dependent on foreign oil. I would rather have oil in the gulf for a time (it will surely be cleaned up eventually) than to give money to middle-eastern countries who despise us and wish our citizens and our troops harm. We should continue drilling for our own oil and have a simultaneous push for renewable energy.
Thoughts?
Oil is a fungible commodity. It doesn’t matter if it’s “foreign” or not. Whatever isn’t purchased by the US will be purchased by other countries.
So that makes it right? The United States should not be giving money to the middle east as a matter of principle. They shouldn’t keep buying it just because “If we don’t, someone else will.”
Oh, if jack assess kil policemen in Uncia they are barbarians, but if people are killed anywhere else it just a matter of daily routine.
When are the bolivian fascist KKK like are going to realize that they are out of luck? They exploited Bolivia for 500 years, and left nothing but poverty. They stole, silver, gold, tin, oil, and now they cry about anything. Just like the “free press” Lies, distorted facts.
Goni, Manfred, get lost please. Go and have a few beers with your exiled friends in Miami.
Pucha! What’s the secret for living 500 years?
Do you acknowledge that it’s correct time to receive the loans, which will make you dreams real.
Evo spent $2,500 to buy World Cup tickets. Evo contributing to the South African and FIFA economies!
I WANT NEWS ABOUT BOLIVIA AND CURRENT ISSUES IN BOLIVIA
UNCIA
J.JORDAN INCHARGE OF 700 MILLION IN ROAD PROJECTS
UN HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT
EPIZANA TRIAL
ETC.
STOP WRITING SO MUCH BULLSHIT AND WRITE ABOUT STUFF THAT REALLY AFECTS THE COUNTRY
Allrighty, honey, here it goes:
Uncia-The presumed policemen, had outsourced themselves so far away from their jurisdiction, and their actions were so incongruous with their police activity, that their transgressions of ancestral code of conduct proceeds…
Jessica-She would like to expand the road program beyond her department, and we wish her all the very best.
Unhuman Rights-Google up Gitmo & Gaza y’can’t get any more “unhuman” than that.
Epizana Trail-The would-be Trail-of-Tears has nothing on the full Campesinado Mobilisations, we all pray for those extreme measures to remain in history.
Actually, yes, there is some food for thought: the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same:
http://www.la-razon.com/version.php?ArticleId=2682&a=1&EditionId=92
http://www.laprensa.com.bo/noticias/01-06-10/noticias.php?nota=01_06_10_poli3.php
You saw 20 years of “pacted democracy” in Bolivia with a highly corrupt party system- which Evo and, ironically, also Manfred had sought to change. But after the regional and local elections this year, we are seeing a comeback of these pacts. More or less the fact that the opposition to Evo is currently fragmented and disorganised at a national level, but still stronger at lower levels, and more significantly the fact that groups like MSM and MPS broke away from MAS.
So while 3 departments elected “opposition” governors, MAS is taking advantage of the fragmentation among the opposition to control the assemblies in Beni and Tarija by forming the unlikeliest of alliances- a MAS-MNR pact in Beni, and a MAS-PAN pact in Tarija (PAN is a fragment of Tuto’s PODEMOS). And the same thing happening in the city councils too. So you basically end up with “lame duck” governors and mayors. There is no convergence of ideas, just a desire on part of the parties involved to gain and retain.
But what does it show? Personalism and clientelism have been features of Bolivian politics in the past three decades and this isn’t changing. MAS is the party of Evo Morales, in the same way that the ADN was of Hugo Banzer, or the MIR was of Jaime Paz Zamora, or those other parties which were personality-based. These parties do not stay united forever. We can see a clientelist aspect of it too, and the fact that the parties of today are no different from the old parties in that beneath their leaders, they are just opportunists looking to benefit from the system.
MAS today is little different from the MNR in the 50s after the 1952 Revolution, and that party too experienced splits. History is slowly but surely repeating itself.
Bolivia’s human rights are deep in the toilet. Murder, hunger,coruption everywhere.
Even choquehuanca said that humans are worth less than ants.