About
Who ends oil aid?
End Oil Aid is a coalition campaign. Its demand is simple and radical: no more public money for oil. From debt campaigners to climate campaigners to the rainforest movement, the groups behind it came together because the same institutions were on both sides of the table.
The coalition
A strange but natural alliance.
Debt and energy campaigners first met in 2006 in Collevecchio, Italy, and turned a shared frustration into a worldwide coalition. More than 200 organizations from 56 countries eventually endorsed the Global Call to End Oil Aid.
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Oil Change International
Energy & climate research and campaigning — publisher of Aiding Oil, Harming the Climate.
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Friends of the Earth U.S.
Grassroots environmental advocacy, pushing Congress and the international institutions.
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Rainforest Action Network
Campaigns against the financiers of oil in the rainforest and beyond.
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Bank Information Center
Monitors and challenges the World Bank Group's project finance.
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Amazon Watch
Defends the Amazon from the oil frontier financed from the north.
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Jubilee USA Network
Debt and economic justice — because the oil debt is a public debt.
Our demands
Three demands. One red line.
01
End oil financing
Phase out public financing of oil and gas field development, pipelines, terminals and petrochemicals — at the World Bank, at the export credit agencies, in aid budgets.
02
Shift the money
Redirect public finance to renewable energy, energy access and climate resilience — and measure it like the budget decision it is.
03
Listen to the evidence
Take the Extractive Industries Review seriously: 2004, Dr. Emil Salim's panel already told the World Bank to phase out oil production finance by 2008. It was ignored. Not again.
The story of oil aid
An old story, carefully forgotten.
In 1981, a U.S. Treasury report recommended using the World Bank to reshape the oil sector of developing countries. Public finance was designed to open the doors for private oil companies — not to build national energy independence.
The campaigns that became End Oil Aid documented the result: Exxon Mobil alone received more than $1 billion in export credit agency support since 1995; Shell, Chevron, BP, Total and Repsol followed. And almost all of it for oil that was exported — never to light a home in the town that hosted the pipeline.
Timeline
Fifteen years of pressure.
2004
The World Bank's Extractive Industries Review recommends phasing out oil production financing by 2008. Management rejects it.
2006
Debt and energy campaigners meet in Collevecchio, Italy. The coalition behind End Oil Aid is born; the campaign site launches with a full-page ad in the Financial Times.
2007
April: the "End Oil Aid Act" (H.R. 1886) is introduced in the US Congress. December: Aiding Oil, Harming the Climate exposes $61.3 billion of public money for oil since 2000. The Global Call to End Oil Aid gathers 200+ organizations.
2008
World Bank lending for coal rises 256% in one year — proof, in the campaign's words, that the "green" Bank was financing more of the problem than the solution.
2013
The Bank's new energy directions limit new coal financing to "rare circumstances".
2017
At the One Planet Summit in Paris, the World Bank Group announces it will no longer finance upstream oil and gas after 2019 — the campaign's core demand, fifteen years after the Extractive Industries Review.
Today
Export credit agencies and national banks still underwrite fossil expansion. The red line remains: no public money for oil.
Join the line.
The next institutions to move will move because the public held them to their own words. Take action.