We take the protests against gas expansion in Germany as a hook to highlight Germany’s involvement in the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure abroad.
The German government supports fossil fuel companies in new destructive projects around the globe—for example, through state guarantees or through its role in the World Bank and other ‘development’ institutions. But private banks and insurance companies from Germany also profit from financing such destructive projects.
In this workshop, we want to look behind the scenes of these deals and together deepen our knowledge about how such fossil fuel financing exactly continues to be possible. We will examine three concrete examples: the financing of oil and gas projects in Bangladesh by the Asian Development Bank, the possible backing of LNG imports from Argentina to Germany by the German state and the insurance of new US-LNG export infrastructure by German insurance companies.
To sum up, we want to get to the bottom of the German profiteers behind the global expansion of fossil fuels and discuss the extent to which neo-colonial patterns are evident in this.