Media Advisory:
Global Green Meeting Calls For a World Boycott of U.S. Oil Companies.
Thursday, April 19, 2001
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The Association of State Green Parties
Media Advisory: Thursday, April 19, 2001 |
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Global Green Meeting calls for a world boycott of U.S. oil companies: Greens target Exxon-Mobil, Texaco, and Chevron, all major contributors to the Bush Campaign, urging the U.S. to rejoin the Kyoto Treaty. WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Greens from 70 countries who gathered for the Global Greens 2001 Conference, which took place in Canberra, Australia on April 14 to 16, endorsed a boycott of major U.S.-based multinational oil companies and their subsidiaries as a strategy to pressure the Bush Administration to rejoin the Kyoto Treaty. In March, George W. Bush withdrew the U.S. from the international Kyoto agreement on measures to reverse global warming, a policy that outraged governments and media throughout the world who note that the U.S., with 4 percent of the world's population, uses about 25 percent of the world's energy resources. The Kyoto treaty establishes a protocol through which industrial countries would cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by an average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Oil, coal, and other corporations have lobbied American government officials against such measures. The Green boycott targets oil companies that gave major contributions to the Bush campaign in 2000: Exxon-Mobil, Texaco, and Chevron. The Global Greens 2001 Conference was organized by the Asia-Pacific Greens Network, the European Federation of Green Parties, the African Federation of Green Parties and the Federación de Partidos Verdes de las Americas. The event drew about 700 delegates and other Greens from Green parties in Europe, Africa, Latin America, the U.S. and Canada, Asia, and the Pacific. 15 Greens from the U.S. attended. The official U.S. delegates were Mike Feinstein, of California, John Rensenbrink, of Maine, and Annie Goeke, of Pennsylvania. The alternates were Tony Affigne, of Rhode Island, and Tod Sloan. ExxonMobil responds.. Proving that oil execs have begun to fret about the proposed boycott, ExxonMobil began to place ads in major U.S. newspapers on Tuesday, April 17. The ads, posted at http://www.exxonmobil.com/news/opeds/index.html, call for deregulation, open markets, and voluntary measures; offer scary warnings about "public toleration of major lifestyle changes"; and blame the stalemate at the Sixth Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Climate Change, which took place at the Hague in November, 2000, on "fundamental flaws" in the Kyoto Protocols. But deregulation, unrestrained markets, and voluntary measures have caused the recent energy crisis in California, have permitted the oil corporations to undertake as little reform as possible, and have led to power companies passing the bill for the high costs of failed and unsafe nuclear plants on to consumers. Furthermore, the reason for the breakdown of the Hague negotiations was obstruction by the U.S., as the Clinton-Gore Administration caved in to the demands of ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel lobbies. Equally disingenuous is ExxonMobil's claim that renewable energy sources (solar and wind) "face serious technical, marketplace and political barriers." Fossil fuel lobbies have opposed transition to such low-cost and self-sustaining measures. A cooperative President Bush has proposed spending cuts of 54 percent for solar energy and 48 percent for wind energy, one of the cheapest and most efficient energy sources known. The April 9, 2001 issue of Business Week includes an article, "Exxon Unleashed: How the world's most powerful corporation plans to dominate the new age of oil exploration" (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_15/b3727001.htm), on Exxon-Mobil's plans to exploit the current "energy crisis." Swiss Green challenges the U.S. Greens for "spoiling" .. During the Canberra Conference, a Green Party member from Switzerland blamed Greens from the U.S. for letting the Nader campaign "spoil" the 2000 election, allowing George W. Bush's victory over Al Gore. Swiss delegate Hans Beat Schaffner pinned responsibility for the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty on Ralph Nader and American Greens and others who voted for him, telling the conference, "If they had only said he would not be standing in Florida, we would not have Bush now." (Swiss Greens said later that Mr. Schaffner was speaking on his own behalf, and not for the party.) But Matilda Banga, a Green delegate from Sierra Leone, and Ingrid Betancourt, a member of the Parliament of Colombia and a delegate from the Partido Verde Oxigeno, stood up to defend American Greens and their right to run candidates who challenge the corporate domination of U.S. policy. Members of ASGP, the network that nominated Ralph Nader to run for President in 2000, recalled that the Clinton-Gore Administration had already begun to sabotage the Kyoto Treaty. In deference to the same fossil fuel lobbies that now dictate Bush policy, the U.S. delegation blocked implementation of the Kyoto Protocols during the Hague Conference Convention on Climate Change, this past November. In an April 16 letter to Mr. Schaffner, former ASGP secretary and Green activist Dean Myerson of Colorado wrote, "Are you aware that the position of the Clinton Administration was to pay other countries to lower their carbon emissions so the USA would not have to? Are you aware that Mr. Gore disavowed any carbon taxes or regulatory limitations on carbon emissions? Are you aware that the Clinton administration was considered responsible for the breakdown of negotiations to implement the Kyoto Treaty? What President Bush has done is to publicly admit what the Clinton (and Gore) administration did as actual practice." ASGP co-chair Steve Herrick of Michigan said, "The U.S. public has a right to expect more from democracy than picking which of two candidates will destroy the environment and democracy more slowly than the other.... Our purpose is to create a world with a clean environment and clean politics. This is our vision, and liberal rhetoric or scare tactics will not distract us from it." Global Green Charter endorsed unanimously The conference endorsed unanimously a Global Green Charter calling for an international environmental organization, a world court which would counteract international "free trade" pacts that have nullified environmental, labor, and human rights protections. Anti-democratic agreements such as NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), which is being negotiated this coming weekend in Quebec, establish secretive bureaucracies with the power to override such protections in the name of corporate investment. A draft of the Charter (to be replaced shortly by the final version) is posted at http://www.global.greens.org.au/Charter.html. The Charter also calls for:
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