How a Ugandan pipeline became ground zero for the future of oil – The Washington Post

Source: How a Ugandan pipeline became ground zero for the future of oil – The Washington Post

The project, if fully constructed, will comprise a T-shaped pipe network running nearly 1,000 miles. The system originates with two feeder pipelines — the already completed part of the project — that run toward one another from a pair of drilling sites near Lake Albert. The plan is for those pipes to merge into a larger line that will continue through landlocked Uganda, then wind east through Tanzania toward an Indian Ocean port.

The project is a joint effort of France’s TotalEnergies, the China National Offshore Oil Corp. and the national oil companies of Uganda and Tanzania. With Uganda’s thick, waxy crude able to flow only at high temperatures, the system would be the longest electrically heated oil pipeline in the world.

…More than 200 environmental and civil society groups — both African and global — have banded together in a coalition called StopEACOP. Rather than protest from the sidelines, they have worked to directly thwart funding of the deal by pressuring global banks and insurance companies. From London to New York to Tokyo, they have converged on bank headquarters with banners and crashed shareholder meetings. They’ve lobbied in private meetings with bank executives. Several activists even met with Pope Francis, leading the Vatican to denounce the project and call for investors to redirect funds to clean energy.

The pipeline has turned into a rallying point because activists see it as objectionable on so many fronts. The project has forcibly displaced scores of people. It involves drilling ina national wildlife park for giraffes and elephants. The groups’ most resonant accusation, though, is that the project would repeat the exploitative pattern of earlier centuries, with foreign companies leeching resources while the resulting greenhouse gas emissions devastate Uganda and the planet.

This is “one last burst of petro-colonialism on the continent suffering most from the climate crisis,” said Bill McKibben, an American environmentalist who co-founded the activist group 350.org.

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Van de Geer — who spent several years working in East Africa, including Uganda, on international development — worried about what might happen in that country if the pipeline was built. She talked about the country’s 80-year-old president, Museveni, who has been accused of sponsoring violence and torture.

“This is not a president interested in the well-being of his people,” she said. Little revenue would trickle down, she said, to the villages in western Uganda.

But even if Uganda’s plans were sound, she said, there was still the planetary issue of megaprojects pumping greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Her group was co-founded by Roger Hallam, who said climate protests didn’t make sense unless you not only worked to understand the science of planetary warming but also emotionally “digested” the implications: The way quality of life would unravel as temperatures soared. The food shortages, starvation and wars. The fires, floods and general suffering.

Van de Geer saw this future so clearly that she’d chosen not to have children. To her, it made the argument over EACOP feel small. One nation’s ambitions for oil production, with a pipeline slated to run for 25 years,was a sign of the world still kidding itself.