Exim Approves $500 Million for Bahrain Oil Project Despite Biden’s Climate Commitments.

(New York times, New York, 14 March 2024) A federal bank that finances projects overseas voted Thursday to put $500 million toward an oil and gas project in Bahrain, a transaction that critics said was out of step with President Biden’s climate commitments. Just days before the vote, six lawmakers had urged the bank, the Export-Import Bank of the United States or ExIm, not to move ahead with the financing, given the project’s negative effects on the climate. “We cannot afford to have ExIm undermine domestic and international climate progress,” lawmakers led by Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said in a letter to the bank’s board of directors last week. Similar articles appeared in Bloomberg, Reuters, the Huffington Post, Politico and E&ENews. Pope Francis has described delaying action on fossil fuels as “suicidal”, pointing to oil and gas companies continuing to carry out new projects – despite the International Energy Agency recently reaffirming that no new oil, gas, or coal fields are compatible with limiting global temperature rise to 1.5ºC – as humanity faces the increasingly severe consequences of the climate crisis.

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