Greenpeace plans protests against ExxonMobil
Date: 24-Apr-02
Country: NETHERLANDS
Author: Matt Daily
The Amsterdam-based environmental lobby group Greenpeace International, which has criticised ExxonMobil for its stance on the Kyoto global warming treaty, said it would organise protests against the group around the globe in mid-May.
The Greenpeace move followed Friday's removal of Robert Watson as chairman of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a secret ballot in Geneva.
However, an ExxonMobil spokeswoman in the United States told Reuters the company had "no official position" on Watson.
The Greenpeace call was to rally opposition against ExxonMobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, but a climate campaigner for the organisation, Stephanie Tunmore, could not comment on what form the protests would take.
"We're not telling people what they should do. We're calling on people to do whatever they find appropriate," she said.
Watson advocated a shift away from fossil fuels like oil, which environmentalists said prompted a campaign by Washington to remove him. President George W. Bush was an oil executive.
Watson was replaced by IPCC vice president Rajendra Pachauri of India, also a supporter of the Kyoto Protocol calling for industrialised states to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
DISPUTED MEMO
A memo last June to the Bush administration, which was obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, asked whether Watson could be replaced at the request of the United States.
The ExxonMobil spokeswoman denied suggestions, however, that the memo was authored by her company. She said it was signed by an external environmental adviser to ExxonMobil who was simply "passing on" information from a third party.
The Bush administration pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol last year citing its likely high costs and failure to demand cuts from developing states such as India and China.
At a news conference on Monday in New Delhi, Pachauri denied that Washington had lobbied for him.
"My support has come from developing countries. It has come from the economies in transition," he said.
Pachauri is an engineer and economist who heads India's Tata Energy Research Institute and is a non-official director of the state-run Indian Oil Corporation.
The IPCC's 2001 report said the Earth's atmosphere was warming faster than expected and made the first link between human activities and higher temperatures.
The IPCC chairman has a key role in drafting the major scientific reports on climate science, as well as the summaries for policy makers which influenced the creation of the Kyoto framework.
"The process of making the summaries is already highly politicised work," said Brussels-based Rob Bradley of environmentalist group Climate Network Europe.
"The guy at the top does have to have a lot of political backbone." (Additional reporting by Robin Pomeroy in Brussels and Sugita Katyal in New Delhi).