“Shaping the age of gas”: How the EU locks in a destructive path

In early June 2015, the CEO of oil giant BP, Bob Dudley, gave a remarkable speech at the World Gas Conference in Paris. He presented a new role for oil multinationals like BP in “shaping the age of gas”. His argument is to convince the world, starting from Europe, that gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, and it has a major role in the energy transition that would save the climate.

This is how oil corporations are getting ready for the climate discussions in Paris. And this is how they framed the argument – “gas is the transition fuel” – which has been pushed for years in policy documents and transition scenarios from major environmental organizations.

This unhappy convergence of visions shares the approach of looking at the planet as a connection of maps, numbers, resources and CO2 molecules, rather than a place where humans, as a part of “nature”, have been living for centuries. The same approach describes “nature” as something rather out there, that should be eventually “protected”, and not as the environment in which we live through a complex set of relations rooted in many values that could be polarized around either exploitation or the commons.

In June when Bob Dudley was speaking, I was getting ready to leave to Azerbaijan, a small country on the Caspian Sea, where BP has been operating since the mid-1990s, right after independence from the former Soviet Union. Due to BP’s operations, Azerbaijan is described as a key energy partner for European “energy security”. I was in the country one year before, and since then all the non-governmental organizations and independent media, with whom we have been in touch, were shut down by the government. Activists and journalists are mostly in jail under fabricated charges, or have escaped abroad.

Emin Huseynov, journalist and founder of the Institute for Journalists Freedom and Safety, was hiding at the Swiss embassy in Baku for 10 months before leaving the country under diplomatic protection of the Swiss government on June 12, 2015. Azerbaijan is a country with over 100 political prisoners, including very young activists whose crime was to call for freedom of expression on a Facebook page. The economy of the country is directly or indirectly controlled by the ruling family, the Aliyev, in power since independence in 1991. The people of Azerbaijan are looking for spaces and opportunities to raise their voices and keep calling on the EU to support their demands for respecting basic freedoms in the country. They denounce that every new economic deal with other countries is reinforcing the power of the ruling family, and the repression against every remaining free voice. They use words such as “corruption” and “rights”, but not “infrastructure” or “climate change”.

However, the EU and BP describe the mega-gas pipeline that will connect Azerbaijan to Europe as a “project of common interest”, strategic for EU “energy security”. This is potentially the largest project ever built between Europe and a neighboring country: a price tag of 45 billion euro and more than 3,500 kilometres of pipes to be built between the western coast of the Caspian Sea, in Azerbaijan, and the south-eastern coast of Italy, in one of the few remaining pristine marine areas in Apulia, passing through Georgia, Turkey, Greece and Albania.

Communities on the two ends of the pipeline are concerned for reasons that are more complex than only environmental issues. Their concerns are rather around democracy, whose principles have been torn apart to make space for the pipeline on its Italian end, and around basic freedoms and rights to speech on the Caspian side. Since the intergovernmental agreements for the construction of the pipeline were signed in 2013, the government of Azerbaijan felt politically covered to arrest every non-embedded voice in the country, to close every independent media and every international organization in the attempt to cut connections between civil society in the country with the rest of the world.

In Italy, the consultation of the Environmental Impact Assessment was flawed. Various government offices gave different opinions on the project. All the local administrations – from the municipality level to the province and region – rejected it and asked for alternatives that were never provided. However, the Italian government used its power to impose governmental decrees, in order to make sure that the project got authorized in April 2015. “Europe is asking for this from us, this is a European priority” is the mantra that government officials repeated at every occasion. When the EU declares that projects of “common interest” cannot be stopped on environmental grounds, that is what happens, despite the environmental violations and the broader set of fundamental human rights abuses.

This picture is not unique; it is rather common, unfortunately. The new European Commission, in power since November 2014, promoted a massive investment plan on large infrastructure as a key tool for economic recovery in the EU. A plan worth 315 billion euro, most of it oriented to finance the Southern Gas Corridor and similar projects, some of them beyond EU borders. Gas storage facilities, LNG plants, highways, high-speed railways, and electricity interconnectors are the main investments, decided somewhere between capitals and Brussels, above the heads of people. Yet, thousands of people will see the construction of such projects happening in their houses, their fields, their mountains and their forests, their beaches and the seas where they live and depend on.

The “superior interest” from such an investment agenda is not serving the interests of the people. And it is not in line with any fight to address climate change. It is rather in the interest of investors and corporate players, themselves more and more dependent on financial markets and reorganized to make money through further extraction of wealth – financial and physical – from territories and their local communities. The Southern Gas Corridor, and the many other projects of “common interest”, will likely be a driver for expropriation in Europe and beyond, and for the reinforcement of financial and state power, which are also becoming actors of repression with the main task to make sure that all “strategic” infrastructure is built. The financial instruments that the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the European Investment Bank, is proposing – namely European project bonds – aim to allow BP and the other corporations involved in the construction of the Gas Corridor to leverage money directly on financial markets, using EU resources to improve the rating of the bonds that pension funds and investors will then buy. Through this system, a revenue stream is created, on which new financial assets are built, that will ultimately guarantee a rent to investors. That means, more money to those locking in a fossil fuel economy and a system of ever-growing accumulation.

This is part of what oil and gas corporations mean when they talk about “shaping the age of gas”: how to make extra profits for them and investors from further exploitation of fossil fuels. This is also part of how Europe and other societies are being reshaped, to allow further extraction of wealth in every possible sphere of our lives and for the advantage of the few – what some call the financialization process of the economy and society at large. There is no space or will in the closed rooms of the UN climate conferences to discuss – not to say understand – the complex power relations that are reshaping our entire society. It is up to communities and movements to challenge this new paradigm before it is too late.

* Elena Gerebizza is part of Re:Common (www.recommon.org), a collective investigating and campaigning against the concentration of power, corruption and devastation of territories. Re:Common moves with communities on struggle to research and practice new forms of society. Elena works with communities opposing large infrastructure across Italy and internationally, including in countries where oil and gas are being extracted.

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