Pollution Pusher, Pollution Trader
The World Bank in 1998
by Daphne Wysham
Institute for Policy Studies
According to a June 1997 report by the Institute for Policy Studies and the International Trade Information Service, investments made by the World Bank are playing a significant role in fueling climate change. Among the key findings of the report, The World Bank and the G-7: Changing the Earth's Climate for Business, are: - The World Bank has funded $9.4 billion in coal, oil, and gas projects since the 1992 Earth Summit. Over their lifetimes these projects will release 9.5 billion tons of carbon, or about one and a half times global fossil fuel emissions for 1995.
- Although earmarked for development assistance and poverty relief, 9 out of 10 World Bank fossil fuel investments end up enriching multinational corporations based in the G-7 countries.
- The poorest 1/3 of the planet, the majority of whom are women, get less than 1/10 of the Bank's energy investments while absorbing most of the environmental and social costs of fossil fuels.
Bank energy strategists admit that 2 billion rural poor are dependent on women's ability to gather fuelwood and dung to meet their energy needs. They will remain unserviced under any scenario. Women are energy managers in virtually every developing country in the world. But, Bank planners fail to even allude to the gender dimensions of the rural energy crisis, ensuring that Bank policies and projects do not address the roots of the problem.
Having funded so much pollution, the World Bank is now vying to become the "middleman" in an emissions trading scheme between industries in countries like the U.S. and industries in former Soviet bloc countries. The Bank, which unveiled its Global Carbon Initiative at the Kyoto climate change conference in December, hopes to eventually extend this scheme to developing countries. Yet, the study found that the Bank invests 100 times more money on projects which promote climate change than on projects which avert it.
The Bank thus wants to profit at the front end and at the tail end of climate change. They are the number one public financier of fossil fuels around the world, and now they are proposing to buy and sell credits to make their investments slightly less polluting. Both investments may generate billions of dollars for the Bank, but they will also generate billions of tons of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere--a price tag the poorest and future generations will be forced to pay.
In response, NGOs from around the world signed on to a declaration crafted by Oil Watch, which was released at the Kyoto Conference of the Parties in December. That declaration called for, among other things, an end to public funding for fossil fuels.
50 Years Is Enough is collaborating with the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network founded by IPS to broadly disseminate their work on climate change and the World Bank and to mobilize pressure from U.S. civil society to hold the Bank accountable to its own rhetoric about promoting environmentally sustainable energy production and meeting the energy needs of the poorest.
For a copy of the report or the NGO Declaration, contact: Daphne Wysham, IPS, 733 15th Street, NW, Ste. 1020, Washington, DC 20005; tel: 202/234-9382; or email: dwysham@igc.org.
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