Yet another standoff between clean drinking water and mining profits has taken shape in Colombia.

Two corporations are insisting their right to pollute trumps human health and the environment. As is customary in these cases, it is clean water that is the underdog here.

Two million people are dependent on water from a high-altitude wetlands, which is also a refuge for endangered species, that a Canadian mining company, Eco Oro Minerals Corporation, wants to use for a gold mine.

The wetlands, the Santurbán páramo in the Andes, has been declared off-limits for mining by Colombia’s highest court due to the area’s environmental sensitivity. Eco Oro is suing the Colombian government because of this under the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The dispute will likely be heard by a secret tribunal that is an arm of the World Bank, even though the World Bank has provided investment capital for Eco Oro to develop the mine.

Eco Oro has not said how much money it intends to ask for, but another mining company, the US-based Tobie Mining and Energy Inc., has separately sued Colombia for US$16.5 billion because the government refused to allow it to establish a gold mine in a national park.

To put that $16.5 billion in perspective, the total represents more than 20% of Colombia’s budget.

El Salvador in $301 gold mine claim

To the north, El Salvador is still awaiting the decision of another secret tribunal in a case heard in September 2014. An Australian mining company, OceanaGold, sued El Salvador for $301 million because it was denied a permit to create a gold mine that would have poisoned the country’s biggest source of water.

Under ‘free trade’ agreements (which have little to do with trade and much to do with enhancing corporate power), governments agree to the mandatory use of ‘investor-state dispute mechanisms.’

What that bland-sounding phrase means is that any ‘investor’ can sue a signatory government to overturn any law or regulation it does not like because the law or regulation ‘confiscates’ its expected profits, with no limitations on who or what constitutes an ‘investment’.

These cases are not heard in regular judicial systems, but rather in secret tribunals with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. The judges who sit on these tribunals are corporate lawyers whose regular practice is representing corporations in these types of disputes.

Environmentalists rally for sensitive wetlands

In the latest Colombian case, that of Eco Oro Minerals, the company sued one month after the Constitutional Court of Colombia ruled that a government plan to permit mining in some portions of the country’s sensitive high-altitude wetlands is unconstitutional.

Eco Oro’s original plan was for an open-pit mine, which was denied by the environmental ministry thanks to an organized campaign by environmentalists. Denied a permit, Eco Oro then began plans for an underground mine, and received $16.8 million in financing from the World Bank to fund a new study.

The environmental ministry subsequently declared the area a protected region, rendering illegal any mine. The final chance to open a mine was ended when the Constitutional Court ruled in February 2016.

The mining company has declared Colombia “in breach” of its obligations and notified Bogotá of its intention to sue if a negotiated settlement can’t be reached. Eco Oro issued a public statement that said, in part:

“The dispute has arisen out of the Government’s measures and omissions, which have directly impacted the rights granted to Eco Oro to explore and exploit its Angostura Project. The measures and omissions that have affected Eco Oro include (without limitation) the Government’s unreasonable delay in clarifying the limits of the Santurbán Páramo and whether it overlapped with the Angostura Project and its persistent failure to provide clarity as to Eco Oro’s right to continue developing its mining project in light of further undefined requirements and later as a consequence of the Constitutional Court’s decision of February 8, 2016, which has broadened the prohibition of mining activities in páramo areas.”

To use more direct language, the company declares it should be allowed to destroy environments for unlimited profit-making. Colombia’s high-altitude wetlands provide 70% of the country’s fresh water, so protecting them is hardly unreasonable.

But ‘free trade’ agreements elevate corporations to the level of a national government (or, arguably, above national governments because only corporations have the right to sue) and elevate private profits above all other human concerns.

Giving with one hand, taking with the other

A commentary in Naked Capitalism notes the irony of the World Bank funding destructive projects at the same time Western governments are encouraging environmental measures to mitigate global warming. The commentator, Don Quijones, writes:

“[W]hile vast sums of Western taxpayer funds are pouring into Colombia to encourage it to protect its environment, Western corporations – with full backing from the World Bank – are doing all they can to prevent the government from safeguarding its environment, including the water supply its people depend on.”

Earlier this month, the World Bank declared it would make a “fundamental shift” by now diverting money to projects that will ameliorate global warming, and claiming that all its future investments would take climate change into account.

Disbelief would be justified here, considering the World Bank’s record of financing massive projects that pollute and contribute greatly to global warming, and that the bank, in 2012, issued a report sounding an alarm against global warming to no noticeable effect.

But that World Bank report was a feat of monumental hypocrisy, and not simply because it called for shifting of money toward ‘green capitalism’ initiatives – in other words, the same runaway train that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophic global warming is supposed to now magically save the world.

The World Bank has provided billions of dollars to finance new coal plants around the world in the recent years and repeatedly has provided capital to make possible dams and energy projects that have displaced large numbers of people and disrupted ecosystems.

Mining company says national park is ‘fraudulent’

The other case filed against Colombia, by the US mining company Tobie Mining and Energy, claims that the country’s government has “expropriated” its investment and that the creating a national park is “fraudulent”.

Tobie claims that the Colombian government (then headed by hard-right authoritarian Álvaro Uribe, whom the company extravagantly praises on its web site) granted approval for its proposed mine in 2008, but before a final agreement could be reached, a national park was created, blocking the mine.

Tobie demands $16.5 billion or to be allowed to go ahead with its gold mine, but does not explain how it calculates what it claims to be the “fair value” of the mining concession. The entire value of all gold exported from Colombia in 2014 (latest figures available) was $1.4 billion, according to the World Bank – considerably less than the value of coffee exported.

The value of Eco Oro’s disallowed mine is also subject to question, as a Canadian Parliament report on trade estimates the value of Colombian “energy and other” products imported to Canada to be C$280 million.

The World Bank secret tribunal that will hear Eco Oro’s suit against Colombia (formally known as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID) has a long history of one-sided, pro-corporate rulings.

The latest of these, on April 4, was a decision that Venezuela must pay the Canadian mining company Crystallex International US$1.4 billion for denying a permit on environmental grounds. The area Crystallex wanted to mine is one of only four pristine forests in Venezuela and home to several Indigenous peoples.

Among other decisions handed down,

• Canada was forced to reverse its ban of the gasoline additive MMT and pay compensation to a US chemical company;
• Mexico was forced to grant a permit to a US metal company that wanted to site an environmentally dangerous waste dump and pay compensation;
• and Canada was required to reverse a transport ban on PCBs that had conformed to environmental treaties.

In this last case, for good measure, the secret tribunal ruled that, when formulating an environmental rule, a government “is obliged to adopt the alternative that is most consistent with open trade.” That last ruling provides the essence of ‘free trade’ agreements – the accumulation of corporate power to override all democratic controls over health, safety, environmental or labor safeguards.

And as awful as these decisions are, worse is what would await us should the Trans-Pacific or Transatlantic partnerships go through as those agreements promise even more draconian rules than the ones already in place.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, has just been published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.

Protestors from Sea Shepherd mounted a vocal protest today at BP’s Annual General Meeting today in London.

Their concern? The fossil fuel giant’s plan to explore for oil in deep seas off South Australia known as the Great Australian Bight (GAB), described by Sea Shepherd Australia’s Managing Director Jeff Hansen as a “global marine treasure.”
 
“The Bight is littered with state and federal marine parks”, he said. “One of BP’s leases even takes in a Commonwealth marine reserve.”

The Bight’s pristine waters, Hansen continued, were home to critical whale and sea lion nurseries as well as providing a home for dolphins, seals, orcas, great white sharks and sea birds, including albatross and the white-bellied sea eagle.
 
But the threat to Australia’s stunning natural heritage is not the only problem. Plans by BP and other fossil fuel companies to drill for oil in the pristine waters off south Australia could take up a third of the country’s entire carbon budget.

The figures are published in the Climate Analytics report, commissioned by conservation group The Wilderness Society. It concludes that adding the oil from the Great Australian Bight (GAB) into the world’s energy system was “inconsistent with the global temperature and emission limits from the Paris agreement”.

Busting Australia’s COP21 emissions targets

Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, one of three authors on the report, said: “Adding additional oil reserves to the world’s energy system, as proposed by BP, is inconsistent with the global temperature and the emission limits the Australian Government agreed to in Paris last year.

“It would simply create the pressure for higher emissions – unless the intention is to not meet the warming limits agreed there. Endeavours to add more oil to the system are therefore clearly at odds with the commitment Australia is making globally to meet its climate targets, and ultimately mean the oil will become a stranded asset.”
 
BP has released no assessment of the amount of oil that could be in its four exploration permit areas. But the Climate Analytics report uses an assessment from smaller company, Bight Petroleum, of nine billion barrels of oil. That would amount to about three gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ when burned, or nearly eight times Australia’s annual emissions.
 
“Our calculations are based on a fraction of what is in this reserve: it could be four times this amount”, said Hare. To keep global warming to below 2C, as agreed at the Paris climate talks, the report says Australia has a CO2 emissions budget of about 9.7Gt CO2 between 2010 and 2050.
 
“This fraction of the Great Australian Bight exploration programme, should it all be burned in Australia, represents sufficient carbon to bust the remaining Australian carbon budget by more than a third on its own, without consideration of fuel imports and all the other fossil fuel projects presently under development”, says the report.

BP’s ‘inadequate’ environmental report

BP submitted an environmental management plan to the Australian Government’s National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) in October 2015.  But NOPSEMA told BP its plan was not adequate and asked the company to resubmit, which BP did in March 2016.
 
NOPSEMA expects to make a decision by mid-May 2016. A Senate inquiry into BP’s drilling plans, looking at the environmental and social impacts, is due to report back in May just days before NOPSEMA’s scheduled judgement.

But Hansen is clear that BP’s drilling has to be opposed in principle: “The Great Australian Bight is backed by the longest line of sea cliffs in the world, stretching hundreds of kilometres and reaching 60 metres high, the height of a 20-storey building, making it even more difficult for any clean-up operations if there was a spill.
 
“And the impact would be long lasting. Six years after the Gulf of Mexico disaster, its impacts are still being felt today, with dead marine life still washing up on beaches, dolphins unable to reproduce and people getting sick while local tourism, fishing and other businesses have not recovered.”

Today’s protest in London followed a call by Greens Senator for South Australia, Robert Simms, for BP shareholders to “raise concerns” at the company’s AGM today:

“BP shareholders should be concerned that their company is willing to risk an environmental catastrophe in the Great Australian Bight. The Greens call on BP shareholders to pressure the company at their AGM in London later today to ditch this inconsiderate plan which puts South Australia’s tourism and fishing industries at grave risk.”
 
Protesters with the Great Australian Bight Alliance also staged a mock oil spill outside BP’s Melbourne HQ this week.

No more Deepwater Horizons!

Wilderness Society South Australia Director Peter Owen said: “We are here to tell BP it has no right to risk the pristine waters of the Great Australian Bight, and that the opposition to its plans is growing in Australia and around the world.

“We want to remind people that BP was the company responsible for the world’s biggest oil spill accident, the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in 2010, when 800 million litres of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.
 
“BP totally stuffed up in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Now BP wants to drill in the deeper, more treacherous and more remote waters of the Great Australian Bight. You have got to be kidding. BP has not even released detailed oil spill modelling. It claims an oil spill will last only 35 days even though the Macondo well spewed billions of litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.”
 
He said an oil spill in the GAB would be “devastating” for South Australia’s $442 million fishing industry and its tourism industries in coastal regions, which he said were worth more than AU$1 billion employing 10,000 people full-time.

Other fossil fuel firms, including Chevron and Santos, also have plans to explore for oil in the GAB, but BP’s proposal to drill four exploration wells as much as 2,200 metres down on the ocean floor are the most advanced.

Graham Readfearn is an independent journalist based in Queensland, Australia, with 15 years experience as a reporter and writer on newspapers, magazines, radio and online. He tweets @readfearn.

This article was originally published on DeSmog.uk. This version has been edited by The Ecologist.

Yet another standoff between clean drinking water and mining profits has taken shape in Colombia.

Two corporations are insisting their right to pollute trumps human health and the environment. As is customary in these cases, it is clean water that is the underdog here.

Two million people are dependent on water from a high-altitude wetlands, which is also a refuge for endangered species, that a Canadian mining company, Eco Oro Minerals Corporation, wants to use for a gold mine.

The wetlands, the Santurbán páramo in the Andes, has been declared off-limits for mining by Colombia’s highest court due to the area’s environmental sensitivity. Eco Oro is suing the Colombian government because of this under the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The dispute will likely be heard by a secret tribunal that is an arm of the World Bank, even though the World Bank has provided investment capital for Eco Oro to develop the mine.

Eco Oro has not said how much money it intends to ask for, but another mining company, the US-based Tobie Mining and Energy Inc., has separately sued Colombia for US$16.5 billion because the government refused to allow it to establish a gold mine in a national park.

To put that $16.5 billion in perspective, the total represents more than 20% of Colombia’s budget.

El Salvador in $301 gold mine claim

To the north, El Salvador is still awaiting the decision of another secret tribunal in a case heard in September 2014. An Australian mining company, OceanaGold, sued El Salvador for $301 million because it was denied a permit to create a gold mine that would have poisoned the country’s biggest source of water.

Under ‘free trade’ agreements (which have little to do with trade and much to do with enhancing corporate power), governments agree to the mandatory use of ‘investor-state dispute mechanisms.’

What that bland-sounding phrase means is that any ‘investor’ can sue a signatory government to overturn any law or regulation it does not like because the law or regulation ‘confiscates’ its expected profits, with no limitations on who or what constitutes an ‘investment’.

These cases are not heard in regular judicial systems, but rather in secret tribunals with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. The judges who sit on these tribunals are corporate lawyers whose regular practice is representing corporations in these types of disputes.

Environmentalists rally for sensitive wetlands

In the latest Colombian case, that of Eco Oro Minerals, the company sued one month after the Constitutional Court of Colombia ruled that a government plan to permit mining in some portions of the country’s sensitive high-altitude wetlands is unconstitutional.

Eco Oro’s original plan was for an open-pit mine, which was denied by the environmental ministry thanks to an organized campaign by environmentalists. Denied a permit, Eco Oro then began plans for an underground mine, and received $16.8 million in financing from the World Bank to fund a new study.

The environmental ministry subsequently declared the area a protected region, rendering illegal any mine. The final chance to open a mine was ended when the Constitutional Court ruled in February 2016.

The mining company has declared Colombia “in breach” of its obligations and notified Bogotá of its intention to sue if a negotiated settlement can’t be reached. Eco Oro issued a public statement that said, in part:

“The dispute has arisen out of the Government’s measures and omissions, which have directly impacted the rights granted to Eco Oro to explore and exploit its Angostura Project. The measures and omissions that have affected Eco Oro include (without limitation) the Government’s unreasonable delay in clarifying the limits of the Santurbán Páramo and whether it overlapped with the Angostura Project and its persistent failure to provide clarity as to Eco Oro’s right to continue developing its mining project in light of further undefined requirements and later as a consequence of the Constitutional Court’s decision of February 8, 2016, which has broadened the prohibition of mining activities in páramo areas.”

To use more direct language, the company declares it should be allowed to destroy environments for unlimited profit-making. Colombia’s high-altitude wetlands provide 70% of the country’s fresh water, so protecting them is hardly unreasonable.

But ‘free trade’ agreements elevate corporations to the level of a national government (or, arguably, above national governments because only corporations have the right to sue) and elevate private profits above all other human concerns.

Giving with one hand, taking with the other

A commentary in Naked Capitalism notes the irony of the World Bank funding destructive projects at the same time Western governments are encouraging environmental measures to mitigate global warming. The commentator, Don Quijones, writes:

“[W]hile vast sums of Western taxpayer funds are pouring into Colombia to encourage it to protect its environment, Western corporations – with full backing from the World Bank – are doing all they can to prevent the government from safeguarding its environment, including the water supply its people depend on.”

Earlier this month, the World Bank declared it would make a “fundamental shift” by now diverting money to projects that will ameliorate global warming, and claiming that all its future investments would take climate change into account.

Disbelief would be justified here, considering the World Bank’s record of financing massive projects that pollute and contribute greatly to global warming, and that the bank, in 2012, issued a report sounding an alarm against global warming to no noticeable effect.

But that World Bank report was a feat of monumental hypocrisy, and not simply because it called for shifting of money toward ‘green capitalism’ initiatives – in other words, the same runaway train that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophic global warming is supposed to now magically save the world.

The World Bank has provided billions of dollars to finance new coal plants around the world in the recent years and repeatedly has provided capital to make possible dams and energy projects that have displaced large numbers of people and disrupted ecosystems.

Mining company says national park is ‘fraudulent’

The other case filed against Colombia, by the US mining company Tobie Mining and Energy, claims that the country’s government has “expropriated” its investment and that the creating a national park is “fraudulent”.

Tobie claims that the Colombian government (then headed by hard-right authoritarian Álvaro Uribe, whom the company extravagantly praises on its web site) granted approval for its proposed mine in 2008, but before a final agreement could be reached, a national park was created, blocking the mine.

Tobie demands $16.5 billion or to be allowed to go ahead with its gold mine, but does not explain how it calculates what it claims to be the “fair value” of the mining concession. The entire value of all gold exported from Colombia in 2014 (latest figures available) was $1.4 billion, according to the World Bank – considerably less than the value of coffee exported.

The value of Eco Oro’s disallowed mine is also subject to question, as a Canadian Parliament report on trade estimates the value of Colombian “energy and other” products imported to Canada to be C$280 million.

The World Bank secret tribunal that will hear Eco Oro’s suit against Colombia (formally known as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID) has a long history of one-sided, pro-corporate rulings.

The latest of these, on April 4, was a decision that Venezuela must pay the Canadian mining company Crystallex International US$1.4 billion for denying a permit on environmental grounds. The area Crystallex wanted to mine is one of only four pristine forests in Venezuela and home to several Indigenous peoples.

Among other decisions handed down,

• Canada was forced to reverse its ban of the gasoline additive MMT and pay compensation to a US chemical company;
• Mexico was forced to grant a permit to a US metal company that wanted to site an environmentally dangerous waste dump and pay compensation;
• and Canada was required to reverse a transport ban on PCBs that had conformed to environmental treaties.

In this last case, for good measure, the secret tribunal ruled that, when formulating an environmental rule, a government “is obliged to adopt the alternative that is most consistent with open trade.” That last ruling provides the essence of ‘free trade’ agreements – the accumulation of corporate power to override all democratic controls over health, safety, environmental or labor safeguards.

And as awful as these decisions are, worse is what would await us should the Trans-Pacific or Transatlantic partnerships go through as those agreements promise even more draconian rules than the ones already in place.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, has just been published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.

Protestors from Sea Shepherd mounted a vocal protest today at BP’s Annual General Meeting today in London.

Their concern? The fossil fuel giant’s plan to explore for oil in deep seas off South Australia known as the Great Australian Bight (GAB), described by Sea Shepherd Australia’s Managing Director Jeff Hansen as a “global marine treasure.”
 
“The Bight is littered with state and federal marine parks”, he said. “One of BP’s leases even takes in a Commonwealth marine reserve.”

The Bight’s pristine waters, Hansen continued, were home to critical whale and sea lion nurseries as well as providing a home for dolphins, seals, orcas, great white sharks and sea birds, including albatross and the white-bellied sea eagle.
 
But the threat to Australia’s stunning natural heritage is not the only problem. Plans by BP and other fossil fuel companies to drill for oil in the pristine waters off south Australia could take up a third of the country’s entire carbon budget.

The figures are published in the Climate Analytics report, commissioned by conservation group The Wilderness Society. It concludes that adding the oil from the Great Australian Bight (GAB) into the world’s energy system was “inconsistent with the global temperature and emission limits from the Paris agreement”.

Busting Australia’s COP21 emissions targets

Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, one of three authors on the report, said: “Adding additional oil reserves to the world’s energy system, as proposed by BP, is inconsistent with the global temperature and the emission limits the Australian Government agreed to in Paris last year.

“It would simply create the pressure for higher emissions – unless the intention is to not meet the warming limits agreed there. Endeavours to add more oil to the system are therefore clearly at odds with the commitment Australia is making globally to meet its climate targets, and ultimately mean the oil will become a stranded asset.”
 
BP has released no assessment of the amount of oil that could be in its four exploration permit areas. But the Climate Analytics report uses an assessment from smaller company, Bight Petroleum, of nine billion barrels of oil. That would amount to about three gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ when burned, or nearly eight times Australia’s annual emissions.
 
“Our calculations are based on a fraction of what is in this reserve: it could be four times this amount”, said Hare. To keep global warming to below 2C, as agreed at the Paris climate talks, the report says Australia has a CO2 emissions budget of about 9.7Gt CO2 between 2010 and 2050.
 
“This fraction of the Great Australian Bight exploration programme, should it all be burned in Australia, represents sufficient carbon to bust the remaining Australian carbon budget by more than a third on its own, without consideration of fuel imports and all the other fossil fuel projects presently under development”, says the report.

BP’s ‘inadequate’ environmental report

BP submitted an environmental management plan to the Australian Government’s National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) in October 2015.  But NOPSEMA told BP its plan was not adequate and asked the company to resubmit, which BP did in March 2016.
 
NOPSEMA expects to make a decision by mid-May 2016. A Senate inquiry into BP’s drilling plans, looking at the environmental and social impacts, is due to report back in May just days before NOPSEMA’s scheduled judgement.

But Hansen is clear that BP’s drilling has to be opposed in principle: “The Great Australian Bight is backed by the longest line of sea cliffs in the world, stretching hundreds of kilometres and reaching 60 metres high, the height of a 20-storey building, making it even more difficult for any clean-up operations if there was a spill.
 
“And the impact would be long lasting. Six years after the Gulf of Mexico disaster, its impacts are still being felt today, with dead marine life still washing up on beaches, dolphins unable to reproduce and people getting sick while local tourism, fishing and other businesses have not recovered.”

Today’s protest in London followed a call by Greens Senator for South Australia, Robert Simms, for BP shareholders to “raise concerns” at the company’s AGM today:

“BP shareholders should be concerned that their company is willing to risk an environmental catastrophe in the Great Australian Bight. The Greens call on BP shareholders to pressure the company at their AGM in London later today to ditch this inconsiderate plan which puts South Australia’s tourism and fishing industries at grave risk.”
 
Protesters with the Great Australian Bight Alliance also staged a mock oil spill outside BP’s Melbourne HQ this week.

No more Deepwater Horizons!

Wilderness Society South Australia Director Peter Owen said: “We are here to tell BP it has no right to risk the pristine waters of the Great Australian Bight, and that the opposition to its plans is growing in Australia and around the world.

“We want to remind people that BP was the company responsible for the world’s biggest oil spill accident, the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in 2010, when 800 million litres of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.
 
“BP totally stuffed up in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Now BP wants to drill in the deeper, more treacherous and more remote waters of the Great Australian Bight. You have got to be kidding. BP has not even released detailed oil spill modelling. It claims an oil spill will last only 35 days even though the Macondo well spewed billions of litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.”
 
He said an oil spill in the GAB would be “devastating” for South Australia’s $442 million fishing industry and its tourism industries in coastal regions, which he said were worth more than AU$1 billion employing 10,000 people full-time.

Other fossil fuel firms, including Chevron and Santos, also have plans to explore for oil in the GAB, but BP’s proposal to drill four exploration wells as much as 2,200 metres down on the ocean floor are the most advanced.

Graham Readfearn is an independent journalist based in Queensland, Australia, with 15 years experience as a reporter and writer on newspapers, magazines, radio and online. He tweets @readfearn.

This article was originally published on DeSmog.uk. This version has been edited by The Ecologist.

Yet another standoff between clean drinking water and mining profits has taken shape in Colombia.

Two corporations are insisting their right to pollute trumps human health and the environment. As is customary in these cases, it is clean water that is the underdog here.

Two million people are dependent on water from a high-altitude wetlands, which is also a refuge for endangered species, that a Canadian mining company, Eco Oro Minerals Corporation, wants to use for a gold mine.

The wetlands, the Santurbán páramo in the Andes, has been declared off-limits for mining by Colombia’s highest court due to the area’s environmental sensitivity. Eco Oro is suing the Colombian government because of this under the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The dispute will likely be heard by a secret tribunal that is an arm of the World Bank, even though the World Bank has provided investment capital for Eco Oro to develop the mine.

Eco Oro has not said how much money it intends to ask for, but another mining company, the US-based Tobie Mining and Energy Inc., has separately sued Colombia for US$16.5 billion because the government refused to allow it to establish a gold mine in a national park.

To put that $16.5 billion in perspective, the total represents more than 20% of Colombia’s budget.

El Salvador in $301 gold mine claim

To the north, El Salvador is still awaiting the decision of another secret tribunal in a case heard in September 2014. An Australian mining company, OceanaGold, sued El Salvador for $301 million because it was denied a permit to create a gold mine that would have poisoned the country’s biggest source of water.

Under ‘free trade’ agreements (which have little to do with trade and much to do with enhancing corporate power), governments agree to the mandatory use of ‘investor-state dispute mechanisms.’

What that bland-sounding phrase means is that any ‘investor’ can sue a signatory government to overturn any law or regulation it does not like because the law or regulation ‘confiscates’ its expected profits, with no limitations on who or what constitutes an ‘investment’.

These cases are not heard in regular judicial systems, but rather in secret tribunals with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. The judges who sit on these tribunals are corporate lawyers whose regular practice is representing corporations in these types of disputes.

Environmentalists rally for sensitive wetlands

In the latest Colombian case, that of Eco Oro Minerals, the company sued one month after the Constitutional Court of Colombia ruled that a government plan to permit mining in some portions of the country’s sensitive high-altitude wetlands is unconstitutional.

Eco Oro’s original plan was for an open-pit mine, which was denied by the environmental ministry thanks to an organized campaign by environmentalists. Denied a permit, Eco Oro then began plans for an underground mine, and received $16.8 million in financing from the World Bank to fund a new study.

The environmental ministry subsequently declared the area a protected region, rendering illegal any mine. The final chance to open a mine was ended when the Constitutional Court ruled in February 2016.

The mining company has declared Colombia “in breach” of its obligations and notified Bogotá of its intention to sue if a negotiated settlement can’t be reached. Eco Oro issued a public statement that said, in part:

“The dispute has arisen out of the Government’s measures and omissions, which have directly impacted the rights granted to Eco Oro to explore and exploit its Angostura Project. The measures and omissions that have affected Eco Oro include (without limitation) the Government’s unreasonable delay in clarifying the limits of the Santurbán Páramo and whether it overlapped with the Angostura Project and its persistent failure to provide clarity as to Eco Oro’s right to continue developing its mining project in light of further undefined requirements and later as a consequence of the Constitutional Court’s decision of February 8, 2016, which has broadened the prohibition of mining activities in páramo areas.”

To use more direct language, the company declares it should be allowed to destroy environments for unlimited profit-making. Colombia’s high-altitude wetlands provide 70% of the country’s fresh water, so protecting them is hardly unreasonable.

But ‘free trade’ agreements elevate corporations to the level of a national government (or, arguably, above national governments because only corporations have the right to sue) and elevate private profits above all other human concerns.

Giving with one hand, taking with the other

A commentary in Naked Capitalism notes the irony of the World Bank funding destructive projects at the same time Western governments are encouraging environmental measures to mitigate global warming. The commentator, Don Quijones, writes:

“[W]hile vast sums of Western taxpayer funds are pouring into Colombia to encourage it to protect its environment, Western corporations – with full backing from the World Bank – are doing all they can to prevent the government from safeguarding its environment, including the water supply its people depend on.”

Earlier this month, the World Bank declared it would make a “fundamental shift” by now diverting money to projects that will ameliorate global warming, and claiming that all its future investments would take climate change into account.

Disbelief would be justified here, considering the World Bank’s record of financing massive projects that pollute and contribute greatly to global warming, and that the bank, in 2012, issued a report sounding an alarm against global warming to no noticeable effect.

But that World Bank report was a feat of monumental hypocrisy, and not simply because it called for shifting of money toward ‘green capitalism’ initiatives – in other words, the same runaway train that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophic global warming is supposed to now magically save the world.

The World Bank has provided billions of dollars to finance new coal plants around the world in the recent years and repeatedly has provided capital to make possible dams and energy projects that have displaced large numbers of people and disrupted ecosystems.

Mining company says national park is ‘fraudulent’

The other case filed against Colombia, by the US mining company Tobie Mining and Energy, claims that the country’s government has “expropriated” its investment and that the creating a national park is “fraudulent”.

Tobie claims that the Colombian government (then headed by hard-right authoritarian Álvaro Uribe, whom the company extravagantly praises on its web site) granted approval for its proposed mine in 2008, but before a final agreement could be reached, a national park was created, blocking the mine.

Tobie demands $16.5 billion or to be allowed to go ahead with its gold mine, but does not explain how it calculates what it claims to be the “fair value” of the mining concession. The entire value of all gold exported from Colombia in 2014 (latest figures available) was $1.4 billion, according to the World Bank – considerably less than the value of coffee exported.

The value of Eco Oro’s disallowed mine is also subject to question, as a Canadian Parliament report on trade estimates the value of Colombian “energy and other” products imported to Canada to be C$280 million.

The World Bank secret tribunal that will hear Eco Oro’s suit against Colombia (formally known as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID) has a long history of one-sided, pro-corporate rulings.

The latest of these, on April 4, was a decision that Venezuela must pay the Canadian mining company Crystallex International US$1.4 billion for denying a permit on environmental grounds. The area Crystallex wanted to mine is one of only four pristine forests in Venezuela and home to several Indigenous peoples.

Among other decisions handed down,

• Canada was forced to reverse its ban of the gasoline additive MMT and pay compensation to a US chemical company;
• Mexico was forced to grant a permit to a US metal company that wanted to site an environmentally dangerous waste dump and pay compensation;
• and Canada was required to reverse a transport ban on PCBs that had conformed to environmental treaties.

In this last case, for good measure, the secret tribunal ruled that, when formulating an environmental rule, a government “is obliged to adopt the alternative that is most consistent with open trade.” That last ruling provides the essence of ‘free trade’ agreements – the accumulation of corporate power to override all democratic controls over health, safety, environmental or labor safeguards.

And as awful as these decisions are, worse is what would await us should the Trans-Pacific or Transatlantic partnerships go through as those agreements promise even more draconian rules than the ones already in place.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, has just been published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.

Protestors from Sea Shepherd mounted a vocal protest today at BP’s Annual General Meeting today in London.

Their concern? The fossil fuel giant’s plan to explore for oil in deep seas off South Australia known as the Great Australian Bight (GAB), described by Sea Shepherd Australia’s Managing Director Jeff Hansen as a “global marine treasure.”
 
“The Bight is littered with state and federal marine parks”, he said. “One of BP’s leases even takes in a Commonwealth marine reserve.”

The Bight’s pristine waters, Hansen continued, were home to critical whale and sea lion nurseries as well as providing a home for dolphins, seals, orcas, great white sharks and sea birds, including albatross and the white-bellied sea eagle.
 
But the threat to Australia’s stunning natural heritage is not the only problem. Plans by BP and other fossil fuel companies to drill for oil in the pristine waters off south Australia could take up a third of the country’s entire carbon budget.

The figures are published in the Climate Analytics report, commissioned by conservation group The Wilderness Society. It concludes that adding the oil from the Great Australian Bight (GAB) into the world’s energy system was “inconsistent with the global temperature and emission limits from the Paris agreement”.

Busting Australia’s COP21 emissions targets

Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, one of three authors on the report, said: “Adding additional oil reserves to the world’s energy system, as proposed by BP, is inconsistent with the global temperature and the emission limits the Australian Government agreed to in Paris last year.

“It would simply create the pressure for higher emissions – unless the intention is to not meet the warming limits agreed there. Endeavours to add more oil to the system are therefore clearly at odds with the commitment Australia is making globally to meet its climate targets, and ultimately mean the oil will become a stranded asset.”
 
BP has released no assessment of the amount of oil that could be in its four exploration permit areas. But the Climate Analytics report uses an assessment from smaller company, Bight Petroleum, of nine billion barrels of oil. That would amount to about three gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ when burned, or nearly eight times Australia’s annual emissions.
 
“Our calculations are based on a fraction of what is in this reserve: it could be four times this amount”, said Hare. To keep global warming to below 2C, as agreed at the Paris climate talks, the report says Australia has a CO2 emissions budget of about 9.7Gt CO2 between 2010 and 2050.
 
“This fraction of the Great Australian Bight exploration programme, should it all be burned in Australia, represents sufficient carbon to bust the remaining Australian carbon budget by more than a third on its own, without consideration of fuel imports and all the other fossil fuel projects presently under development”, says the report.

BP’s ‘inadequate’ environmental report

BP submitted an environmental management plan to the Australian Government’s National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) in October 2015.  But NOPSEMA told BP its plan was not adequate and asked the company to resubmit, which BP did in March 2016.
 
NOPSEMA expects to make a decision by mid-May 2016. A Senate inquiry into BP’s drilling plans, looking at the environmental and social impacts, is due to report back in May just days before NOPSEMA’s scheduled judgement.

But Hansen is clear that BP’s drilling has to be opposed in principle: “The Great Australian Bight is backed by the longest line of sea cliffs in the world, stretching hundreds of kilometres and reaching 60 metres high, the height of a 20-storey building, making it even more difficult for any clean-up operations if there was a spill.
 
“And the impact would be long lasting. Six years after the Gulf of Mexico disaster, its impacts are still being felt today, with dead marine life still washing up on beaches, dolphins unable to reproduce and people getting sick while local tourism, fishing and other businesses have not recovered.”

Today’s protest in London followed a call by Greens Senator for South Australia, Robert Simms, for BP shareholders to “raise concerns” at the company’s AGM today:

“BP shareholders should be concerned that their company is willing to risk an environmental catastrophe in the Great Australian Bight. The Greens call on BP shareholders to pressure the company at their AGM in London later today to ditch this inconsiderate plan which puts South Australia’s tourism and fishing industries at grave risk.”
 
Protesters with the Great Australian Bight Alliance also staged a mock oil spill outside BP’s Melbourne HQ this week.

No more Deepwater Horizons!

Wilderness Society South Australia Director Peter Owen said: “We are here to tell BP it has no right to risk the pristine waters of the Great Australian Bight, and that the opposition to its plans is growing in Australia and around the world.

“We want to remind people that BP was the company responsible for the world’s biggest oil spill accident, the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in 2010, when 800 million litres of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.
 
“BP totally stuffed up in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Now BP wants to drill in the deeper, more treacherous and more remote waters of the Great Australian Bight. You have got to be kidding. BP has not even released detailed oil spill modelling. It claims an oil spill will last only 35 days even though the Macondo well spewed billions of litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.”
 
He said an oil spill in the GAB would be “devastating” for South Australia’s $442 million fishing industry and its tourism industries in coastal regions, which he said were worth more than AU$1 billion employing 10,000 people full-time.

Other fossil fuel firms, including Chevron and Santos, also have plans to explore for oil in the GAB, but BP’s proposal to drill four exploration wells as much as 2,200 metres down on the ocean floor are the most advanced.

Graham Readfearn is an independent journalist based in Queensland, Australia, with 15 years experience as a reporter and writer on newspapers, magazines, radio and online. He tweets @readfearn.

This article was originally published on DeSmog.uk. This version has been edited by The Ecologist.

Yet another standoff between clean drinking water and mining profits has taken shape in Colombia.

Two corporations are insisting their right to pollute trumps human health and the environment. As is customary in these cases, it is clean water that is the underdog here.

Two million people are dependent on water from a high-altitude wetlands, which is also a refuge for endangered species, that a Canadian mining company, Eco Oro Minerals Corporation, wants to use for a gold mine.

The wetlands, the Santurbán páramo in the Andes, has been declared off-limits for mining by Colombia’s highest court due to the area’s environmental sensitivity. Eco Oro is suing the Colombian government because of this under the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The dispute will likely be heard by a secret tribunal that is an arm of the World Bank, even though the World Bank has provided investment capital for Eco Oro to develop the mine.

Eco Oro has not said how much money it intends to ask for, but another mining company, the US-based Tobie Mining and Energy Inc., has separately sued Colombia for US$16.5 billion because the government refused to allow it to establish a gold mine in a national park.

To put that $16.5 billion in perspective, the total represents more than 20% of Colombia’s budget.

El Salvador in $301 gold mine claim

To the north, El Salvador is still awaiting the decision of another secret tribunal in a case heard in September 2014. An Australian mining company, OceanaGold, sued El Salvador for $301 million because it was denied a permit to create a gold mine that would have poisoned the country’s biggest source of water.

Under ‘free trade’ agreements (which have little to do with trade and much to do with enhancing corporate power), governments agree to the mandatory use of ‘investor-state dispute mechanisms.’

What that bland-sounding phrase means is that any ‘investor’ can sue a signatory government to overturn any law or regulation it does not like because the law or regulation ‘confiscates’ its expected profits, with no limitations on who or what constitutes an ‘investment’.

These cases are not heard in regular judicial systems, but rather in secret tribunals with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. The judges who sit on these tribunals are corporate lawyers whose regular practice is representing corporations in these types of disputes.

Environmentalists rally for sensitive wetlands

In the latest Colombian case, that of Eco Oro Minerals, the company sued one month after the Constitutional Court of Colombia ruled that a government plan to permit mining in some portions of the country’s sensitive high-altitude wetlands is unconstitutional.

Eco Oro’s original plan was for an open-pit mine, which was denied by the environmental ministry thanks to an organized campaign by environmentalists. Denied a permit, Eco Oro then began plans for an underground mine, and received $16.8 million in financing from the World Bank to fund a new study.

The environmental ministry subsequently declared the area a protected region, rendering illegal any mine. The final chance to open a mine was ended when the Constitutional Court ruled in February 2016.

The mining company has declared Colombia “in breach” of its obligations and notified Bogotá of its intention to sue if a negotiated settlement can’t be reached. Eco Oro issued a public statement that said, in part:

“The dispute has arisen out of the Government’s measures and omissions, which have directly impacted the rights granted to Eco Oro to explore and exploit its Angostura Project. The measures and omissions that have affected Eco Oro include (without limitation) the Government’s unreasonable delay in clarifying the limits of the Santurbán Páramo and whether it overlapped with the Angostura Project and its persistent failure to provide clarity as to Eco Oro’s right to continue developing its mining project in light of further undefined requirements and later as a consequence of the Constitutional Court’s decision of February 8, 2016, which has broadened the prohibition of mining activities in páramo areas.”

To use more direct language, the company declares it should be allowed to destroy environments for unlimited profit-making. Colombia’s high-altitude wetlands provide 70% of the country’s fresh water, so protecting them is hardly unreasonable.

But ‘free trade’ agreements elevate corporations to the level of a national government (or, arguably, above national governments because only corporations have the right to sue) and elevate private profits above all other human concerns.

Giving with one hand, taking with the other

A commentary in Naked Capitalism notes the irony of the World Bank funding destructive projects at the same time Western governments are encouraging environmental measures to mitigate global warming. The commentator, Don Quijones, writes:

“[W]hile vast sums of Western taxpayer funds are pouring into Colombia to encourage it to protect its environment, Western corporations – with full backing from the World Bank – are doing all they can to prevent the government from safeguarding its environment, including the water supply its people depend on.”

Earlier this month, the World Bank declared it would make a “fundamental shift” by now diverting money to projects that will ameliorate global warming, and claiming that all its future investments would take climate change into account.

Disbelief would be justified here, considering the World Bank’s record of financing massive projects that pollute and contribute greatly to global warming, and that the bank, in 2012, issued a report sounding an alarm against global warming to no noticeable effect.

But that World Bank report was a feat of monumental hypocrisy, and not simply because it called for shifting of money toward ‘green capitalism’ initiatives – in other words, the same runaway train that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophic global warming is supposed to now magically save the world.

The World Bank has provided billions of dollars to finance new coal plants around the world in the recent years and repeatedly has provided capital to make possible dams and energy projects that have displaced large numbers of people and disrupted ecosystems.

Mining company says national park is ‘fraudulent’

The other case filed against Colombia, by the US mining company Tobie Mining and Energy, claims that the country’s government has “expropriated” its investment and that the creating a national park is “fraudulent”.

Tobie claims that the Colombian government (then headed by hard-right authoritarian Álvaro Uribe, whom the company extravagantly praises on its web site) granted approval for its proposed mine in 2008, but before a final agreement could be reached, a national park was created, blocking the mine.

Tobie demands $16.5 billion or to be allowed to go ahead with its gold mine, but does not explain how it calculates what it claims to be the “fair value” of the mining concession. The entire value of all gold exported from Colombia in 2014 (latest figures available) was $1.4 billion, according to the World Bank – considerably less than the value of coffee exported.

The value of Eco Oro’s disallowed mine is also subject to question, as a Canadian Parliament report on trade estimates the value of Colombian “energy and other” products imported to Canada to be C$280 million.

The World Bank secret tribunal that will hear Eco Oro’s suit against Colombia (formally known as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID) has a long history of one-sided, pro-corporate rulings.

The latest of these, on April 4, was a decision that Venezuela must pay the Canadian mining company Crystallex International US$1.4 billion for denying a permit on environmental grounds. The area Crystallex wanted to mine is one of only four pristine forests in Venezuela and home to several Indigenous peoples.

Among other decisions handed down,

• Canada was forced to reverse its ban of the gasoline additive MMT and pay compensation to a US chemical company;
• Mexico was forced to grant a permit to a US metal company that wanted to site an environmentally dangerous waste dump and pay compensation;
• and Canada was required to reverse a transport ban on PCBs that had conformed to environmental treaties.

In this last case, for good measure, the secret tribunal ruled that, when formulating an environmental rule, a government “is obliged to adopt the alternative that is most consistent with open trade.” That last ruling provides the essence of ‘free trade’ agreements – the accumulation of corporate power to override all democratic controls over health, safety, environmental or labor safeguards.

And as awful as these decisions are, worse is what would await us should the Trans-Pacific or Transatlantic partnerships go through as those agreements promise even more draconian rules than the ones already in place.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, has just been published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.

Protestors from Sea Shepherd mounted a vocal protest today at BP’s Annual General Meeting today in London.

Their concern? The fossil fuel giant’s plan to explore for oil in deep seas off South Australia known as the Great Australian Bight (GAB), described by Sea Shepherd Australia’s Managing Director Jeff Hansen as a “global marine treasure.”
 
“The Bight is littered with state and federal marine parks”, he said. “One of BP’s leases even takes in a Commonwealth marine reserve.”

The Bight’s pristine waters, Hansen continued, were home to critical whale and sea lion nurseries as well as providing a home for dolphins, seals, orcas, great white sharks and sea birds, including albatross and the white-bellied sea eagle.
 
But the threat to Australia’s stunning natural heritage is not the only problem. Plans by BP and other fossil fuel companies to drill for oil in the pristine waters off south Australia could take up a third of the country’s entire carbon budget.

The figures are published in the Climate Analytics report, commissioned by conservation group The Wilderness Society. It concludes that adding the oil from the Great Australian Bight (GAB) into the world’s energy system was “inconsistent with the global temperature and emission limits from the Paris agreement”.

Busting Australia’s COP21 emissions targets

Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, one of three authors on the report, said: “Adding additional oil reserves to the world’s energy system, as proposed by BP, is inconsistent with the global temperature and the emission limits the Australian Government agreed to in Paris last year.

“It would simply create the pressure for higher emissions – unless the intention is to not meet the warming limits agreed there. Endeavours to add more oil to the system are therefore clearly at odds with the commitment Australia is making globally to meet its climate targets, and ultimately mean the oil will become a stranded asset.”
 
BP has released no assessment of the amount of oil that could be in its four exploration permit areas. But the Climate Analytics report uses an assessment from smaller company, Bight Petroleum, of nine billion barrels of oil. That would amount to about three gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ when burned, or nearly eight times Australia’s annual emissions.
 
“Our calculations are based on a fraction of what is in this reserve: it could be four times this amount”, said Hare. To keep global warming to below 2C, as agreed at the Paris climate talks, the report says Australia has a CO2 emissions budget of about 9.7Gt CO2 between 2010 and 2050.
 
“This fraction of the Great Australian Bight exploration programme, should it all be burned in Australia, represents sufficient carbon to bust the remaining Australian carbon budget by more than a third on its own, without consideration of fuel imports and all the other fossil fuel projects presently under development”, says the report.

BP’s ‘inadequate’ environmental report

BP submitted an environmental management plan to the Australian Government’s National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) in October 2015.  But NOPSEMA told BP its plan was not adequate and asked the company to resubmit, which BP did in March 2016.
 
NOPSEMA expects to make a decision by mid-May 2016. A Senate inquiry into BP’s drilling plans, looking at the environmental and social impacts, is due to report back in May just days before NOPSEMA’s scheduled judgement.

But Hansen is clear that BP’s drilling has to be opposed in principle: “The Great Australian Bight is backed by the longest line of sea cliffs in the world, stretching hundreds of kilometres and reaching 60 metres high, the height of a 20-storey building, making it even more difficult for any clean-up operations if there was a spill.
 
“And the impact would be long lasting. Six years after the Gulf of Mexico disaster, its impacts are still being felt today, with dead marine life still washing up on beaches, dolphins unable to reproduce and people getting sick while local tourism, fishing and other businesses have not recovered.”

Today’s protest in London followed a call by Greens Senator for South Australia, Robert Simms, for BP shareholders to “raise concerns” at the company’s AGM today:

“BP shareholders should be concerned that their company is willing to risk an environmental catastrophe in the Great Australian Bight. The Greens call on BP shareholders to pressure the company at their AGM in London later today to ditch this inconsiderate plan which puts South Australia’s tourism and fishing industries at grave risk.”
 
Protesters with the Great Australian Bight Alliance also staged a mock oil spill outside BP’s Melbourne HQ this week.

No more Deepwater Horizons!

Wilderness Society South Australia Director Peter Owen said: “We are here to tell BP it has no right to risk the pristine waters of the Great Australian Bight, and that the opposition to its plans is growing in Australia and around the world.

“We want to remind people that BP was the company responsible for the world’s biggest oil spill accident, the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in 2010, when 800 million litres of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.
 
“BP totally stuffed up in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Now BP wants to drill in the deeper, more treacherous and more remote waters of the Great Australian Bight. You have got to be kidding. BP has not even released detailed oil spill modelling. It claims an oil spill will last only 35 days even though the Macondo well spewed billions of litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.”
 
He said an oil spill in the GAB would be “devastating” for South Australia’s $442 million fishing industry and its tourism industries in coastal regions, which he said were worth more than AU$1 billion employing 10,000 people full-time.

Other fossil fuel firms, including Chevron and Santos, also have plans to explore for oil in the GAB, but BP’s proposal to drill four exploration wells as much as 2,200 metres down on the ocean floor are the most advanced.

Graham Readfearn is an independent journalist based in Queensland, Australia, with 15 years experience as a reporter and writer on newspapers, magazines, radio and online. He tweets @readfearn.

This article was originally published on DeSmog.uk. This version has been edited by The Ecologist.

Yet another standoff between clean drinking water and mining profits has taken shape in Colombia.

Two corporations are insisting their right to pollute trumps human health and the environment. As is customary in these cases, it is clean water that is the underdog here.

Two million people are dependent on water from a high-altitude wetlands, which is also a refuge for endangered species, that a Canadian mining company, Eco Oro Minerals Corporation, wants to use for a gold mine.

The wetlands, the Santurbán páramo in the Andes, has been declared off-limits for mining by Colombia’s highest court due to the area’s environmental sensitivity. Eco Oro is suing the Colombian government because of this under the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The dispute will likely be heard by a secret tribunal that is an arm of the World Bank, even though the World Bank has provided investment capital for Eco Oro to develop the mine.

Eco Oro has not said how much money it intends to ask for, but another mining company, the US-based Tobie Mining and Energy Inc., has separately sued Colombia for US$16.5 billion because the government refused to allow it to establish a gold mine in a national park.

To put that $16.5 billion in perspective, the total represents more than 20% of Colombia’s budget.

El Salvador in $301 gold mine claim

To the north, El Salvador is still awaiting the decision of another secret tribunal in a case heard in September 2014. An Australian mining company, OceanaGold, sued El Salvador for $301 million because it was denied a permit to create a gold mine that would have poisoned the country’s biggest source of water.

Under ‘free trade’ agreements (which have little to do with trade and much to do with enhancing corporate power), governments agree to the mandatory use of ‘investor-state dispute mechanisms.’

What that bland-sounding phrase means is that any ‘investor’ can sue a signatory government to overturn any law or regulation it does not like because the law or regulation ‘confiscates’ its expected profits, with no limitations on who or what constitutes an ‘investment’.

These cases are not heard in regular judicial systems, but rather in secret tribunals with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. The judges who sit on these tribunals are corporate lawyers whose regular practice is representing corporations in these types of disputes.

Environmentalists rally for sensitive wetlands

In the latest Colombian case, that of Eco Oro Minerals, the company sued one month after the Constitutional Court of Colombia ruled that a government plan to permit mining in some portions of the country’s sensitive high-altitude wetlands is unconstitutional.

Eco Oro’s original plan was for an open-pit mine, which was denied by the environmental ministry thanks to an organized campaign by environmentalists. Denied a permit, Eco Oro then began plans for an underground mine, and received $16.8 million in financing from the World Bank to fund a new study.

The environmental ministry subsequently declared the area a protected region, rendering illegal any mine. The final chance to open a mine was ended when the Constitutional Court ruled in February 2016.

The mining company has declared Colombia “in breach” of its obligations and notified Bogotá of its intention to sue if a negotiated settlement can’t be reached. Eco Oro issued a public statement that said, in part:

“The dispute has arisen out of the Government’s measures and omissions, which have directly impacted the rights granted to Eco Oro to explore and exploit its Angostura Project. The measures and omissions that have affected Eco Oro include (without limitation) the Government’s unreasonable delay in clarifying the limits of the Santurbán Páramo and whether it overlapped with the Angostura Project and its persistent failure to provide clarity as to Eco Oro’s right to continue developing its mining project in light of further undefined requirements and later as a consequence of the Constitutional Court’s decision of February 8, 2016, which has broadened the prohibition of mining activities in páramo areas.”

To use more direct language, the company declares it should be allowed to destroy environments for unlimited profit-making. Colombia’s high-altitude wetlands provide 70% of the country’s fresh water, so protecting them is hardly unreasonable.

But ‘free trade’ agreements elevate corporations to the level of a national government (or, arguably, above national governments because only corporations have the right to sue) and elevate private profits above all other human concerns.

Giving with one hand, taking with the other

A commentary in Naked Capitalism notes the irony of the World Bank funding destructive projects at the same time Western governments are encouraging environmental measures to mitigate global warming. The commentator, Don Quijones, writes:

“[W]hile vast sums of Western taxpayer funds are pouring into Colombia to encourage it to protect its environment, Western corporations – with full backing from the World Bank – are doing all they can to prevent the government from safeguarding its environment, including the water supply its people depend on.”

Earlier this month, the World Bank declared it would make a “fundamental shift” by now diverting money to projects that will ameliorate global warming, and claiming that all its future investments would take climate change into account.

Disbelief would be justified here, considering the World Bank’s record of financing massive projects that pollute and contribute greatly to global warming, and that the bank, in 2012, issued a report sounding an alarm against global warming to no noticeable effect.

But that World Bank report was a feat of monumental hypocrisy, and not simply because it called for shifting of money toward ‘green capitalism’ initiatives – in other words, the same runaway train that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophic global warming is supposed to now magically save the world.

The World Bank has provided billions of dollars to finance new coal plants around the world in the recent years and repeatedly has provided capital to make possible dams and energy projects that have displaced large numbers of people and disrupted ecosystems.

Mining company says national park is ‘fraudulent’

The other case filed against Colombia, by the US mining company Tobie Mining and Energy, claims that the country’s government has “expropriated” its investment and that the creating a national park is “fraudulent”.

Tobie claims that the Colombian government (then headed by hard-right authoritarian Álvaro Uribe, whom the company extravagantly praises on its web site) granted approval for its proposed mine in 2008, but before a final agreement could be reached, a national park was created, blocking the mine.

Tobie demands $16.5 billion or to be allowed to go ahead with its gold mine, but does not explain how it calculates what it claims to be the “fair value” of the mining concession. The entire value of all gold exported from Colombia in 2014 (latest figures available) was $1.4 billion, according to the World Bank – considerably less than the value of coffee exported.

The value of Eco Oro’s disallowed mine is also subject to question, as a Canadian Parliament report on trade estimates the value of Colombian “energy and other” products imported to Canada to be C$280 million.

The World Bank secret tribunal that will hear Eco Oro’s suit against Colombia (formally known as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID) has a long history of one-sided, pro-corporate rulings.

The latest of these, on April 4, was a decision that Venezuela must pay the Canadian mining company Crystallex International US$1.4 billion for denying a permit on environmental grounds. The area Crystallex wanted to mine is one of only four pristine forests in Venezuela and home to several Indigenous peoples.

Among other decisions handed down,

• Canada was forced to reverse its ban of the gasoline additive MMT and pay compensation to a US chemical company;
• Mexico was forced to grant a permit to a US metal company that wanted to site an environmentally dangerous waste dump and pay compensation;
• and Canada was required to reverse a transport ban on PCBs that had conformed to environmental treaties.

In this last case, for good measure, the secret tribunal ruled that, when formulating an environmental rule, a government “is obliged to adopt the alternative that is most consistent with open trade.” That last ruling provides the essence of ‘free trade’ agreements – the accumulation of corporate power to override all democratic controls over health, safety, environmental or labor safeguards.

And as awful as these decisions are, worse is what would await us should the Trans-Pacific or Transatlantic partnerships go through as those agreements promise even more draconian rules than the ones already in place.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, has just been published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.

Yet another standoff between clean drinking water and mining profits has taken shape in Colombia.

Two corporations are insisting their right to pollute trumps human health and the environment. As is customary in these cases, it is clean water that is the underdog here.

Two million people are dependent on water from a high-altitude wetlands, which is also a refuge for endangered species, that a Canadian mining company, Eco Oro Minerals Corporation, wants to use for a gold mine.

The wetlands, the Santurbán páramo in the Andes, has been declared off-limits for mining by Colombia’s highest court due to the area’s environmental sensitivity. Eco Oro is suing the Colombian government because of this under the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The dispute will likely be heard by a secret tribunal that is an arm of the World Bank, even though the World Bank has provided investment capital for Eco Oro to develop the mine.

Eco Oro has not said how much money it intends to ask for, but another mining company, the US-based Tobie Mining and Energy Inc., has separately sued Colombia for US$16.5 billion because the government refused to allow it to establish a gold mine in a national park.

To put that $16.5 billion in perspective, the total represents more than 20% of Colombia’s budget.

El Salvador in $301 gold mine claim

To the north, El Salvador is still awaiting the decision of another secret tribunal in a case heard in September 2014. An Australian mining company, OceanaGold, sued El Salvador for $301 million because it was denied a permit to create a gold mine that would have poisoned the country’s biggest source of water.

Under ‘free trade’ agreements (which have little to do with trade and much to do with enhancing corporate power), governments agree to the mandatory use of ‘investor-state dispute mechanisms.’

What that bland-sounding phrase means is that any ‘investor’ can sue a signatory government to overturn any law or regulation it does not like because the law or regulation ‘confiscates’ its expected profits, with no limitations on who or what constitutes an ‘investment’.

These cases are not heard in regular judicial systems, but rather in secret tribunals with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. The judges who sit on these tribunals are corporate lawyers whose regular practice is representing corporations in these types of disputes.

Environmentalists rally for sensitive wetlands

In the latest Colombian case, that of Eco Oro Minerals, the company sued one month after the Constitutional Court of Colombia ruled that a government plan to permit mining in some portions of the country’s sensitive high-altitude wetlands is unconstitutional.

Eco Oro’s original plan was for an open-pit mine, which was denied by the environmental ministry thanks to an organized campaign by environmentalists. Denied a permit, Eco Oro then began plans for an underground mine, and received $16.8 million in financing from the World Bank to fund a new study.

The environmental ministry subsequently declared the area a protected region, rendering illegal any mine. The final chance to open a mine was ended when the Constitutional Court ruled in February 2016.

The mining company has declared Colombia “in breach” of its obligations and notified Bogotá of its intention to sue if a negotiated settlement can’t be reached. Eco Oro issued a public statement that said, in part:

“The dispute has arisen out of the Government’s measures and omissions, which have directly impacted the rights granted to Eco Oro to explore and exploit its Angostura Project. The measures and omissions that have affected Eco Oro include (without limitation) the Government’s unreasonable delay in clarifying the limits of the Santurbán Páramo and whether it overlapped with the Angostura Project and its persistent failure to provide clarity as to Eco Oro’s right to continue developing its mining project in light of further undefined requirements and later as a consequence of the Constitutional Court’s decision of February 8, 2016, which has broadened the prohibition of mining activities in páramo areas.”

To use more direct language, the company declares it should be allowed to destroy environments for unlimited profit-making. Colombia’s high-altitude wetlands provide 70% of the country’s fresh water, so protecting them is hardly unreasonable.

But ‘free trade’ agreements elevate corporations to the level of a national government (or, arguably, above national governments because only corporations have the right to sue) and elevate private profits above all other human concerns.

Giving with one hand, taking with the other

A commentary in Naked Capitalism notes the irony of the World Bank funding destructive projects at the same time Western governments are encouraging environmental measures to mitigate global warming. The commentator, Don Quijones, writes:

“[W]hile vast sums of Western taxpayer funds are pouring into Colombia to encourage it to protect its environment, Western corporations – with full backing from the World Bank – are doing all they can to prevent the government from safeguarding its environment, including the water supply its people depend on.”

Earlier this month, the World Bank declared it would make a “fundamental shift” by now diverting money to projects that will ameliorate global warming, and claiming that all its future investments would take climate change into account.

Disbelief would be justified here, considering the World Bank’s record of financing massive projects that pollute and contribute greatly to global warming, and that the bank, in 2012, issued a report sounding an alarm against global warming to no noticeable effect.

But that World Bank report was a feat of monumental hypocrisy, and not simply because it called for shifting of money toward ‘green capitalism’ initiatives – in other words, the same runaway train that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophic global warming is supposed to now magically save the world.

The World Bank has provided billions of dollars to finance new coal plants around the world in the recent years and repeatedly has provided capital to make possible dams and energy projects that have displaced large numbers of people and disrupted ecosystems.

Mining company says national park is ‘fraudulent’

The other case filed against Colombia, by the US mining company Tobie Mining and Energy, claims that the country’s government has “expropriated” its investment and that the creating a national park is “fraudulent”.

Tobie claims that the Colombian government (then headed by hard-right authoritarian Álvaro Uribe, whom the company extravagantly praises on its web site) granted approval for its proposed mine in 2008, but before a final agreement could be reached, a national park was created, blocking the mine.

Tobie demands $16.5 billion or to be allowed to go ahead with its gold mine, but does not explain how it calculates what it claims to be the “fair value” of the mining concession. The entire value of all gold exported from Colombia in 2014 (latest figures available) was $1.4 billion, according to the World Bank – considerably less than the value of coffee exported.

The value of Eco Oro’s disallowed mine is also subject to question, as a Canadian Parliament report on trade estimates the value of Colombian “energy and other” products imported to Canada to be C$280 million.

The World Bank secret tribunal that will hear Eco Oro’s suit against Colombia (formally known as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID) has a long history of one-sided, pro-corporate rulings.

The latest of these, on April 4, was a decision that Venezuela must pay the Canadian mining company Crystallex International US$1.4 billion for denying a permit on environmental grounds. The area Crystallex wanted to mine is one of only four pristine forests in Venezuela and home to several Indigenous peoples.

Among other decisions handed down,

• Canada was forced to reverse its ban of the gasoline additive MMT and pay compensation to a US chemical company;
• Mexico was forced to grant a permit to a US metal company that wanted to site an environmentally dangerous waste dump and pay compensation;
• and Canada was required to reverse a transport ban on PCBs that had conformed to environmental treaties.

In this last case, for good measure, the secret tribunal ruled that, when formulating an environmental rule, a government “is obliged to adopt the alternative that is most consistent with open trade.” That last ruling provides the essence of ‘free trade’ agreements – the accumulation of corporate power to override all democratic controls over health, safety, environmental or labor safeguards.

And as awful as these decisions are, worse is what would await us should the Trans-Pacific or Transatlantic partnerships go through as those agreements promise even more draconian rules than the ones already in place.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, has just been published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.