You knew he had to be there, even if we didn’t know his name before. As ace reporter Daphne Eviatar reveals in this month’s American Lawyer, Ronald Jonkers is the oil industry’s man in Iraq - and US taxpayers are picking up the bill.Jonkers unfortunately wouldn’t comment for the article - and apparently few would. A spokesman for the State Department, would say only that “our guys are helping the Iraqis write their law and pass their law,” and that “the hydrocarbon law is critically important.”

Well, that puts Mister Jonkers more on the inside than all of Iraqi civil society, including the vast majority of Iraqi Parliamentarians who didn’t even see the law until it was dropped last month. Now whose oil is it anyways?

The Wolfowitz must go campaign, which we at Oil Change support for a wide variety of reasons - including the fact that Bank lending for oil increased by more than 75% last year - is now in high gear. ParkRidge47, who created the now famous Obama / Think Different ad, has done a brilliant satire on The Office, called, The Bank. Keep up with the latest at WorldBankPresident.org

Environmental organizations today applauded Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) for introducing legislation that seeks to end subsidies for the international operations of oil companies. The “End Oil Aid” bill, introduced yesterday, calls on international financial institutions including the World Bank, Export Import Bank and Overseas Private Investment Corporation to stop financing oil and gas projects.“Oil aid not only wastes taxpayer dollars, it supports projects that can fuel corruption and conflict in developing countries and cause irreversible social and environmental impacts on the local communities there,” said Jennifer Kalafut, Campaign Coordinator at Oil Change International.

“Every year American taxpayers commit billions to financial institutions like the World Bank, which in turn lavish subsidies on the same oil companies who are earning record profits while fueling global warming,” said David Waskow, International Program Director at Friends of the Earth U.S. “We congratulate Congressman Hinchey on taking a long overdue step to end the scandal of ‘oil aid’”

Each year U.S. agencies such as the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) along with international financial institutions like the World Bank provide financial support worth billions of dollars in the oil and gas industry. In 2005, Ex-Im authorized $1.5 billion in financing for projects in the oil, gas and petrochemicals sector. And according to the Bank Information Center, support for oil companies by the International Finance Corporation—the World Bank’s private sector arm—skyrocketed by 77 percent between 2005 and 2006.

Bruce Rich, International Program Director at Environmental Defense, praised Congressman Hinchey’s bill as a “path-breaking initiative to end perverse policies that, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief World Bank economist, and head Advisor to the United Kingdom Government on the Economics of Climate Change and Development, ‘distort the market in favor of existing fossil fuel technologies’ as well as reduce the incentive to develop innovative climate friendly energy sources.”

“We must combat global warming by helping put countries around the world on a path toward a clean energy future, but oil aid does the exact opposite,” said Waskow. “Combustion of oil and gas causes more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, fueling a climate crisis whose impacts will be felt most severely in poor countries.”

See EndOilAid.org for more info