Green coalition lobbies US Export-Import bank on Barrier Reef

CONTROVERSIAL comments by Barack Obama about the Great Barrier Reef are being used to lobby the Export-Import Bank of the US.

Fred Hochberg, president of the Export-Import Bank of the US, in Perth.

CONTROVERSIAL comments by US President Barack Obama about the Great Barrier Reef are being used to lobby the Export-Import Bank of the US to reject any funding requests for Adani’s Galilee Basin coal projects in Queensland.

Mr Obama outraged the federal government at last year’s G20 summit when he raised protection of the reef in the context of combating climate change.

An international coalition of conservationists, small-businesspeople, academics and politicians has used Mr Obama’s comments in a ­direct plea to EXIM Bank chairman Fred Hochberg not to lend money to Adani’s Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin.

EXIM has already lent $US5 billion ($6.4bn) to the Curtis Island liquefied natural gas plants in Gladstone, a decision that has been challenged by environment groups in the US courts.

Adani’s Indian owners have previously raised the potential of seeking funds from EXIM.

Adani’s Galilee Basin project has become a totemic issue for envir­onmental groups campaigning for reef protection and action on climate change.

The company is under pressure publicly over the ownership structure of the Carmichael project­ and its financing after the defeat of the Newman government, which had pledged to help fund rail and port infrastructure for the Galilee Basin development.

In a letter to Mr Hochberg, the lobby groups have urged him to “commit to rejecting any proposal for US EXIM Bank financing for harmful industrial schemes inside the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, includ­­ing Adani’s proposed massive coal-export terminal at Abbot Point (and) the associated Carmichael mine and infrastructure”.

The groups told EXIM that financing would “put the US government at unacceptable financial and reputational risk, will undermine President Obama’s effort to fight climate change and will undercut worldwide efforts to conserve World Heritage areas, like the Great Barrier Reef”.

John Coequyt, the director of the Sierra Club’s International Climate Program, which partners with grassroots groups, said the Adani project would damage the reef while making climate change worse.

“The notion that EXIM would use American taxpayer dollars to support it is unconscionable,” Mr Coequyt said.

“If the Export-Import Bank puts a single US dollar towards funding this project, it is literally financing the destruction of one of the great natural wonders of the world.”

Friends of the Earth US president Erich Pica said that providing finance would “contradict President Obama’s call to protect this special place for his daughters and grandchildren, and his State of the Union address, at which he called climate change the biggest threat to future generations.”

The letter was signed by leading environment groups from Australia and the US and Greens senators from around the nation.

Adani said last night that expor­t credit agencies were “a potenti­al source of funding”.