SEEN

World Bank claims preeminence in climate debate

Listen to Daphne Wysham's commentary on Marketplace, a nightly public radio program.

Paul Wolfowitz's World Bank is proclaiming its "lead role" in the global warming dialogue in the aftermath of the G8 meeting. On July 19, 2005, the Bank prominently posted news of this role on its website.

The NGO community has obtained a transcript of a July 27 Bank staff meeting in which Wolfowitz and Bank vice presidents Ian Johnson and Kathy Sierra discuss the climate implications of the G8 meeting. Wolfowitz sidesteps a question about U.S. domestic responsibility for climate change.

SEEN director and Institute for Policy Studies fellow Daphne Wysham said, "Climate leadership and science should be left to the multilateral framework of the UN, not hijacked by the World Bank, an institution that profits from fossil fuels and carbon trading."

Over the past decade, SEEN has been tracking the World Bank's deliberate inaction on climate change. We have exposed:

how the Bank's energy projects prioritize pumping oil from developing countries into the G8 markets;
how it fails to account for greenhouse gas emissions generated by its own projects;
how its fossil fuel projects mainly benefit G8-based corporations, not the world's two billion rural poor;
how it exaggerates the extent of its renewable energy and energy efficiency finance, and failed to correct these errors when they were brought to its attention;
how the Bank's executive board last August ignored a Bank-commissioned study -- the Extractive Industries Review -- that recommended an end to oil and coal financing;
and, how much of this has been orchestrated in Washington by a succession of U.S. presidents -- Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II.

From the inception of the Climate Convention, at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the G-8 has resisted efforts by Southern countries to set up clean energy mechanisms independent of the World Bank. It channeled climate change chump change through the Global Environment Facility, then through Bank carbon trading schemes under the Clean Development Mechanism.

Now, the Bank is going even further: with the G-8's blessing it is poised to hijack the Kyoto Protocol and the Climate Convention's political processes. G-8 countries generate 46 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and they control 46 percent of the voting power at the World Bank. Only 14 percent of the world's people live in G-8 territory.

In its final communique from Gleneagles, the G-8 concluded:

"The World Bank will take a leadership role in creating a new framework for clean energy and development, including investment and financing."

To learn more, please take a look at our new fact sheet on the World Bank and climate change, and our vast library of related resources. Our most comprehensive rebuttal of present World Bank climate claims is the recent study, A Wrong Turn from Rio: The World Bank's Road to Climate Catastrophe.