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At World Bank, climate change isn’t part of the equation
Judy Pasternak, Los Angeles Times
At the World Bank — heavily influenced by its largest shareholder, the United States — the effect of projects on climate change is not even calculated.
Bank environment officials pressed to account for emissions in the mid- to late-’90s and again in an unpublished paper in 2002, and only now, five years later, are attempting again.
“Our biggest obstacle has been that politically, [climate change] is very controversial,” said Kristalina Georgieva, the bank’s strategy and operations director for sustainable development.
In February 2006, for example, the World Bank’s operating vice presidents gathered to discuss a draft of a progress report, requested by the Group of 8 leading industrialized nations, titled “Climate Change, Energy and Sustainable Development: Towards an Investment Framework.” The bank executives endorsed the report, according to minutes obtained by the Government Accountability Project and authenticated by The Times.
But afterward, the summary noted, the office of then-World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz — a President Bush appointee — “asked the team to refocus the paper shifting from a climate lens mainly to a clean-energy lens.” A note of uncertainty should be injected, a top Wolfowitz aide instructed: “Elaborate on the challenge of mitigating climate change and reducing the vulnerability to the impact of climate change.”
(12 August 2007)
Related at The Independent: Wolfowitz ‘tried to censor World Bank on climate change’.
We should all be at Heathrow protesting (Comment)
Johann Hari, The Independent
It is collective pressure on government, not consumer choices, that the world needs now
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This week, two thousand people will gather at London’s Heathrow airport with tents and sleeping bags – not to EasyJet to the beach, but to alert their fellow citizens to the Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing.
…The protesters at Heathrow are trying to shake us awake, so we do not sleepwalk into more and more of this. Over the next week they will be smeared and slandered as “vandals” and “eco-terrorists”. (The Government has disgracefully encouraged the police to use powers introduced to deal with jihadi murderers against them.) But far from being “violent”, they are trying to prevent the vast and growing violence of global warming, without hurting a single human being.
Last year, the protesters targeted the Drax coal-fuelled power-station in Yorkshire. This year, they have chosen Heathrow, an airport with a fifth terminal opening in March and demands for a sixth already in, for a simple reason. The current expansion in flying is, on its own, a guarantee that Britain will fail to meet even the most modest of its environmental targets.
Look at the figures. Flying currently accounts for nearly 20 percent of Britain’s impact on global warming – and unlike the other factors, it is growing rapidly.
(13 August 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
