UCSD - The Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies

IR/PS in the News : Copley News Service

"Greenpeace critical of Sempra plans for Mexico"
April 15, 2002

By Diane Lindquist

The environmental group Greenpeace is issuing a report today (Monday) that claims Sempra Energy Corp. is carrying out a mega-development plan that will change the border region into a vast "dirty energy export zone."

The report, titled Terra Sempra - translated Sempra Land - portrays the San Diego firm as a price-gouging, polluting, unethical corporation bent on dominating the local cross-border energy market.

Sempra, it says, is running away from California's stringent air and water standards by building many of its projects in Mexico. The report says Mexico's looser rules allow the company to build projects that will pollute the skies and deplete the water resources of "poor, marginal" U.S. and Mexican border communities. "It's a clear instance of a company in a Northern country exploiting a Southern country for environmental and economic reasons," said J.P. Ross, the report's author.

Greenpeace also faults President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox for allowing the "fast and furious development of the border region."

Although Sempra's plans in Mexico have generated controversy for months, the Greenpeace report takes the issue to a new level, said Mark Spaulding, director of the environmental law and civil society program at UCSD's Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.

"This is one of the highest profile international environmental groups saying something about our region. And that's a pretty big deal," he said. "This takes a local issue and makes it an international issue."

Sempra issued a terse statement sharply disagreeing with the Greenpeace report, saying it is "chock full of false allegations, inaccuracies and politically motivated charges."

"The report is especially offensive in that it dismisses the sovereignty of Mexico to pursue economic development projects that will help improve the qualify of life of its citizens," Sempra said. "Greenpeace's unsubstantiated allegations fly in the face of both fact and reality."

Nearly 20 big energy companies are planning projects in Baja California and elsewhere along the northern Mexico border to sell natural gas and electricity to U.S. and Mexican consumers. The conglomeration of projects "will have terrible impacts all along the border, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico," Ross said.

Greenpeace focused on Sempra, he said, because the company is developing so many projects in Mexico and the southwestern United States.

"Greenpeace is committed to stopping this plan from becoming reality," says the report, an advance copy of which was obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The bilingual document highlights Sempra's plans for a network extending from Ensenada to Mexicali in Baja California and northward throughout Southern California, Arizona and Nevada. The system includes seven new power plants, hundreds of miles of new natural gas pipelines and electrical transmission lines and a liquefied natural gas, or LNG, receiving terminal.

In its response, Sempra warned that U.S. and Mexican officials predict serious power shortages if electricity plants aren't built soon. And it noted that the LNG terminal and the cross-border pipeline it's building will supply much-needed natural gas, a relatively clean-burning fuel, to many local power plants, thus reducing pollution.

Greenpeace acknowledges that Baja California and California need new energy sources. But it contends energy efficiency and renewable energy projects would fill the need.

Bill Powers, a leader of the binational Border Power Plant Working Group, said he hopes the Greenpeace report draws more attention to the projects' consequences.

"We have worked within the system," Powers said. "We write comment letters (to U.S. and Mexican federal officials) addressing serious issues. And the response has been, 'Thank you very much,' and nothing happens except the projects keep moving forward."

Powers' group and now Greenpeace contend the power plant project Sempra is building in Mexicali will boost harmful emissions in an already-polluted cross-border air basin. They also complain that the facility's cooling system, which will reclaim the city's sewage, will waste a potential water resource and dump harmful high-saline water into the ecologically sensitive New River and the Salton Sea.

Sempra insists the Mexicali power plant is being fitted with the same emission controls as the plants it wants to build in California. For example, to build a plant in Escondido, the company is agreeing to institute "offsets," which require reducing other sources of pollution in the area to offset the emissions that even the most modern plant produces.

Jorge Escobar, a Baja California environmental official who defended Sempra's Mexicali plant, conceded Mexico's rules are not as stringent as California's. But he said local and state authorities will ask Sempra to agree to institute offsets in Mexicali once the plant is operating.

Michael Shames, executive director of San Diego-based Utility Consumers' Action Network and a long-time Sempra critic, said the report depicts Sempra as an unregulated monopoly and raises questions that need to be addressed.

"But I have to appreciate there may be some good answers," he said. "Building Mexican power plants might allow us to close some dirty power plants on this side of the border."

Also contributing to this story was staff writer Craig D. Rose.