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	Overview of the Problems
	Highlight: Russia's Sakhalin II
	Highlight: The BTC Pipeline

United States: US Ex-Im

The US Export-Import Bank (US Ex-Im or US ExIm) is the official export credit agency of the United States government. Large projects sponsored by US Ex-Im include the Baku-T’bilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, the Bonny Island Liquefied Natural Gas plant, the Bataan nuclear power plant, and many destructive projects operated by Asia Pulp and Paper (APP). When fully operational, the BTC pipeline will transport a million barrels of oil a day from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. Construction of the pipeline has already led to massive human rights violations and environmental hazards. Once combustion of the crude oil commences, it will generate as much CO2 as the United Kingdom’s total energy production. This project is one of the reasons Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are suing US Ex-Im and OPIC for their role in climate change. Another such project is the Chad-Cameroon pipeline to which US Ex-Im provided a USD $158.1M loan guarantee, and which is expected to emit 445.9 million tons of CO2 over its lifetime. The Bonny Island LNG plant in Nigeria is destructive to a large area of mangrove forests which local people depend upon for fishing. Additionally, Brown & Root (KBR), the British subsidiary of Halliburton, is accused of offering an almost USD $180M bribe to Nigerian officials to secure a contract for the construction of the plant. Another US Ex-Im project, the Bataan Nuclear Power plant, is plunging the Philippines severely into debt. The plant has been complete since 1985 but has never been operational. In the meantime, interest on the US Ex-Im loan is accumulating at the rate of USD $155,000 a day. The APP drove itself into debt with its cycle of debt-driven expansion. With the help of US Ex-Im guarantees, APP developed pulp and paper mills in countries such as Indonesia and China at a rate faster than what legal logging practices could provide. To meet the increased demand for paper products which they themselves had created, they had to resort to illegal logging of millions of hectares of Indonesia’s rain forests. APP was driven into debt as suitable forest disappeared because they had failed to replant what they had destroyed. APP could only resort to continued illegal deforestation to try to recover from their debt; they eventually were forced to declare bankruptcy. Now the US Ex-Im bank is suing APP for USD $104M in lost investment.

A Guardian of Jobs or a 'Reverse Robin Hood' September 3, 2002 By Leslie Wayne, New York Times: "At a time when the Bush administration says it wants to cut back on corporate welfare, the Export-Import bank, often called a 'reverse Robin Hood' for taking money from American taxpayers and giving it to wealthy corporations, is growing. In June, while the public was focused on corporate scandals, President Bush quietly signed legislation to double the scope of the bank's operations and allow it to provide up to $100 billion in international trade assistance at any one time."