In a powerful new video, When We Were Hela, Pulitzer Prize - winning journalist Ian Shearn takes us to the jungles of Papua New Guinea, where a massive natural gas project has caused death and destruction in local communities. The story in his video, as well as in his in-depth article in The Nation, centers around a $19 billion liquid natural gas project built by ExxonMobil and financed by the US Export-Import Bank. In 2012,…
As trade negotiators from the United States and the European Union gather in Brussels for the latest round in negotiations for the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment partnership (TTIP), twenty-nine environmental, farm, and consumer groups sent a letter yesterday to United States Trade Representative Michael Froman. The groups sounded the alarm about the demands that the meat industry is lobbying for in the deal. The "meat and feed industries on both sides of the Atlantic…
As the Green Climate Fund board gathers in Bali this week for its latest meeting, 80 civil society organizations sent a letter to GCF board members sounding the alarm about the attempted corporate takeover of the Green Climate Fund.
The letter cites several concrete and troubling examples of how multinational corporations have insinuated themselves into the governance and design of the GCF. A few include:
Within the general UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process,…
Today President Obama gave a much-anticipated climate change speech at Georgetown University. In true Obama fashion, the speech was pretty inspiring and sounded great; but dig a little deeper into the actual plan and you’ll start uncovering some warts. As Friends of the Earth’s climate and energy director, Damon Moglen, stated earlier today, the plan has some welcome components, such as regulation of carbon dioxide from power plants. But it also is…
From climate change to clean water, from healthy forests to safer food, progress on our most important environmental priorities is being crippled by the outsized role of money in politics. It’s an old story by now: big polluters, with their vast army of lobbyists, too often outgun environmental advocates on important public health and environmental policies.
Big corporations, with their loads campaign cash, are able to taint our elections and install anti-environmental public officials. A…
My husband is a self-described Olympics junkie, and our television has been on nonstop since the opening ceremonies. As a result, I have been barraged by the full spectrum of TV commercials -- all of them attempts to bathe corporate logos in the warm flame of Olympic glory.
The irony of some of these corporate sponsorships isn’t lost on most people. McDonalds (home of the Angus bacon cheeseburger -- clocking in at 39 grams of…
This week, Friends of Earth, along with 30 other organizations based in California, urged Governor Brown to prevent international REDD carbon credits from entering California’s carbon trading system.
Over the past several years, Chinese overseas investments have had a powerful global impact, from the Gibe 3 dam in Ethiopia, to the Alberta tar sands in Canada, to the Shwe oil and gas project in Myanmar. In the past, many of these environmentally and socially controversial mega-projects were bankrolled by development institutions such as the World Bank, national export credit agencies, or big Wall Street banks. But increasingly, Chinese banks have…
Friends of the Earth has long been at the forefront of the effort to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. These subsidies perpetuate our dependence on the dirty energy sources of the past, rob us of our capacity to fund energy solutions of the future, and undermine any attempts to implement smart climate policy. Friends of the Earth supports the eventual elimination of all fossil fuel subsidies. But as we point out in a new position…
The growing power of Chinese multinational corporations around the world, particularly in developing countries, is drawing a lot of attention. International companies complain that they are losing out to Chinese businesses benefiting from state support – government backing with few environmental and social requirements. Environmentalists and human rights activists are concerned that Chinese banks and companies may be spurring a race to the bottom by not adhering to international policies and norms such…