Japan, China, and South Korea violate Paris agreement by funding coal in Indonesia

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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By Paul Homewood

From Christian Science Monitor:

July 19, 2017 Bangkok—Japan, China, and South Korea are bankrolling environmentally destructive coal-fired power plants in Indonesia despite their pledges to reduce climate-changing emissions under the Paris climate deal, analysts told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Australia-based environmental finance organization Market Forces said it analyzed 22 coal power deals in Indonesia since January 2010 and found state-run financiers for the three nations were involved in 18 of them.

In all, foreign banks, both commercial and state-owned, are providing 98 percent of the debt finance for the projects, amounting to $16.7 billion.

Indonesian banks provided just 2 percent of the financial resources for the projects, according to the Market Forces analysis published this week.

Japan, China, and South Korea "are on board with the Paris climate change agreement. They make all the right noises politically," Julien Vincent, executive director of Market Forces, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

But "these are the same governments underwriting new coal development elsewhere," he said, calling the actions "egregious."

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Some of us have been pointing out this sort of hypocrisy for a while!