Nabucco: a short-sighted answer to the energy security challenge
Publisher: CEE Bankwatch Network
Volume: 2 pages, pdf
Description:
While the proponents of the Nabucco gas pipeline project successfully managed to exploit the recent war in Georgia and the short-lived energy crisis caused by the Ukraine-Russia gas conflict to gain a political boost for the economically dubious project, they have also been very successful in avoiding several important issues. As there is a lack of guaranteed gas supply, some of the countries involved have turned their eyes to Turkmenistan, a country with an extremely bad track record of human rights' abuses. Similarly Azerbaijan, another potential source of gas, and where the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline has demonstrated that these large infrastructure projects fail to bring real development to the region, is also failing to respect human rights. There is also an important question: whether there aren't better uses for limited public funding than for a project that simply switches the import of one questionable source of fossil fuels to another?