Saudi Arabia: Swiss climate wreckers strike again

Export credit for Saudi gas expansion betrays Swiss climate diplomacy

At the recent climate COP in Belém, governments negotiated to prepare a global roadmap for the exit from coal, oil and gas. The plan failed because countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, China and India blocked it. The Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, which led the Swiss delegation, supported the global exit from fossil fuels and called out Saudi Arabia and other countries for opposing the roadmap in a public statement.

At the very same time, the Swiss Export Risk Insurance SERV quietly worked to support the expansion of the fossil fuel sector in Saudi Arabia. Thumbing its nose at the Swiss climate diplomats, SERV just announced its intention to support a massive gas power plant of 3,010 megawatt in the country. (For comparison, Switzerland’s largest power facility, the Leibstadt nuclear power plant, has a capacity of 1,285 megawatt.)

The Saudi Arabia project follows within weeks of SERV support for other new gas power projects in Côte d’Ivoire and Poland. In total, SERV has given preliminary or final approval to 10 new gas power plants around the world since the start of 2023. This is the period for which Switzerland – represented by its climate diplomats – pledged to no longer offer any support for new international fossil fuel projects under the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP) at the Glasgow COP.

The 10 new projects in SERV’s gas power fleet have a total capacity of 8,900 megawatt. Even if the emissions from extracting and transporting gas are neglected, these power plants will emit an estimated 20 million tons of CO2 equivalents every year. (CO2 equivalents cover CO2 but also other greenhouse gases such as methane.)

SERV projects add more emissions than the rest of Switzerland is reducing

Under its revised CO2 law, which entered into effect this year, Switzerland must cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half between 1990 and 2030. The country reduced its emissions from 55 million to 41 million tons of CO2e between 1990 and 2023, and must reduce them by another 13 million tons by 2030.

Many Swiss people and companies work diligently to reduce their carbon footprint. Yet the annual emissions from gas power projects which SERV approved during the last three years alone will be much higher than the reductions which Switzerland aims to achieve under its CO2 law between 2023 and 2030.

Ironically, the Swiss government plans to achieve a growing share of emission reductions by financing green projects overseas. Studies have demonstrated that such projects are hardly ever effective because their emission reductions would have happened even without Swiss support or cannot be sustained. In contrast, the additional emissions which Swiss export credits facilitate overseas are very real, but are ignored under the Swiss CO2 law.

Legal, political and moral responsibility

Switzerland’s pledge under the CETP is not legally binding and when SERV is boosting the expansion of fossil fuels, it may well be operating within the letter of the law. Yet SERV and the bodies which control it not only have a legal responsibility. They are failing in their political and moral responsibility to address the biggest crisis of the 21^st century.

These bodies include SERV’s board of directors, chaired by Barbara Hayoz, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, led by Secretary of State Helene Budliger Artieda, and ultimately the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, led by Federal Councillor Guy Parmelin. They are causing significant damage to the climate and to Switzerland’s reputation.

“We need to hold fossil fuel companies and their enablers to account”, UN Secretary General António Guterres said in September 2022. “That includes the banks and other financiers that continue to invest and underwrite carbon pollution.”

This blog post makes a small contribution to hold leading Swiss fossil fuel enablers to account. We should remember their names while we keep up efforts to reduce the Swiss carbon footprint and advocate for climate action. “History is coming for the planet-wreckers, the fossil fuel barons and their enablers, profiting from destruction”, António Guterres also said, in May 2023. “Together, the rest of us can write a different story.”

(This blog post has also been published in German language.)