RIYADH, 19 November 2007 — OPEC yesterday assured the world of adequate and timely supply of oil and pledged millions of dollars to protect the planet’s environment from the effects of climate change.
Leaders of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries stressed the importance of world peace for the stability of oil prices. “We insist on the importance of world peace to guarantee investments in the energy sector and the stability of the market,” said the final communiqué issued at the end of the two-day summit. There was no mention of calls by consumer nations for an increase in OPEC output to help cool prices which have soared to levels near $100 a barrel.
Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Al-Naimi later told a news conference: “Fluctuations in the market have nothing to do with OPEC,” adding there were many other factors affecting prices.
The OPEC statement also did not explicitly mention the politically charged issue of the falling dollar, which Iran, Venezuela and new member Ecuador had favored.
“The day will arrive when not only in OPEC, but also in Latin America, we will be liberated from the dollar,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said yesterday.
Chavez and Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, whose country rejoined OPEC at the summit, had both pleaded for a more political agenda for the group.
Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates pledged $150 million each yesterday to a new fund to tackle global warming. The creation of the fund, which is now worth $750 million, was announced by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah on Saturday at the opening of the summit. “Kuwait announces it is donating $150 million to support this program,” Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah was quoted by KUNA as saying during the summit.
The UAE donation was announced through its official WAM news agency after the end of the summit.
Qatari Energy Minister Abdullah ibn Hamad Al-Attiyah said Emir Sheikh Hamad ibn Khalifa Al-Thani had also contributed $150 million to the fund.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, said it would contribute $300 million to the fund which is set to focus on finding technological solutions to the climate change problem.
Other countries were reluctant to make similar commitments. “We are not committing anything. We don’t know what the proposal is,” Algerian Energy Minister Chakib Khelil said.
According to the final summit statement, OPEC leaders will insist on the importance of technology to enable the use of “clean oil,” notably carbon capture and storage, to help fight global warming.
“We insist on the importance of clean technologies for the protection of the world’s environment and insist on the importance of developing technologies that can help combat the problem of global warming, such as carbon sequestration,” said the communiqué.
Ecuador’s President Correa told reporters the world’s richest nations should pay for the protection of the environment in the world’s poorest countries. He proposed a special tax on oil-consuming nations to pay for environmental protection elsewhere, with OPEC overseeing spending.
“It annoys us a bit, all this moralizing ‘don’t cut down your trees’ from the First World, when they’ve already done it,” Correa said. “If Europe wants to breathe pure air from Amazon countries then the Amazon countries shouldn’t have to pay for it.”
At the summit, Indonesia proposed that OPEC contribute 50 US cents from every barrel of oil sold in to a special environmental fund to protect forests.
Addressing fellow leaders, Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla pushed a development and environmental agenda expressing “mixed feelings” about the high oil price.
The Asian nation, which will host a crucial climate change meeting next month, noted that many OPEC countries had environmentally valuable woodland, suggesting a donation could be made to the proposed “Oil for Forests” fund.
“If these countries can set aside a certain amount of the price per barrel of oil... and devote the fund to manage forests in a sustainable way, we will certainly have a better environment,” he said.
An official in the Indonesia delegation said that the idea was that OPEC countries would make the 50 cent contribution from the sale of their oil to a fund called “Oil for forests.”
Indonesia faces huge problems of illegal logging and the destruction of forests to make room for palm oil plantations.
— Additional input from agencies
