[DEBATE] : (Fwd) WB blahblah in Bali

[Patrick Bond]

(This is dangerous, folks. Fortunately there are great bullshit 
detectors working hard there...)


World Bank’s IFC, GEF Launch "Earth Fund," Forest Carbon Fund;

Groups, Governments say "Just Stop Funding Fossil Fuels"



In Bali:

Daphne Wysham Janet Redman:
Mobile: +62 8174779109 +62 81338984882
daphne at ips-dc.org janet at ips-dc.org


Bali, December 10, 2007 - Although the World Bank continues to finance 
fossil fuels at a rate of over $1 billion a year, it now claims to be 
helping to save the climate. The private sector lending arm of the Bank, 
the International Finance Corporation, together with Global 
Environmental Facility (GEF), are launching the Earth Fund on Dec. 10, 
and claim that this fund will be addressing the most pressing 
environmental challenges in developing countries, among them, climate 
change. However, the so-called Earth Fund investments are dwarfed by the 
climate impact of the World Bank's fossil fuel and other climate 
changing investments elsewhere.

"The launching of this fund reveals yet again the sheer hypocrisy of the 
World Bank claiming to be working to halt climate change while 
continuing to finance fossil fuels, which hurt the poor and are the main 
cause of climate change, " said Daphne Wysham, co-director of the 
Sustainable Energy & Economy Network (SEEN), a project of the Institute 
for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, DC. The World Bank conducted a 
three-year review that concluded in 2004, the Extractive Industries 
Review (EIR), which was headed up by the head of the Indonesian 
delegation to the UNFCCC, Emil Salim. The EIR and Dr. Salim recommended 
the World Bank Group get out of coal and oil entirely by 2008, finding 
that the poor were worse off as a result of these and other extractive 
industry investments.

The GEF and the IFC will respectively designate $50 million and $10 
million to the Earth Fund. Yet the Bank continues to invest over 17 
times that amount in fossil fuels each year. It also finances oil palm 
plantations that have resulted in the destruction of tropical forests, 
one of the most important sinks of greenhouse gas.



The World Bank is planning to announce its Forest Carbon Partnership 
Facility on Dec. 11 in Bali, despite having not consulted with 
Indigenous Peoples who will be most impacted by the Fund, and who have 
expressed strong reservations.


"The World Bank is profiting immensely off of the carbon market," said 
Janet Redman, a researcher with SEEN and IPS. "We estimate they have 
made over $260 million on the $2 billion they have brokered in the 
carbon market thus far. To top it off, less than a fifth of the projects 
in their carbon finance portfolio are for real renewable energy 
investment, while more than 80 percent of the funds disbursed to date 
has gone to the polluting fossil fuel and industrial gas sectors.”


The Bank does not calculate the climate impact of its fossil fuel or 
other climate change lending, while it does calculate and profit from 
its carbon trading activity. As a result, other multilateral development 
banks and most private sector lenders in the developing world who look 
to the World Bank for leadership on climate change issues are doing the 
same. "The World Bank ignores its own experts' recommendations, heads of 
state, recommendations from the G-8, and now is even defying a majority 
of European Parliamentarians calling on the Bank to get out of fossil 
fuels. The World Bank is an outlaw institution that must be defunded if 
we are to save our climate," said Wysham.



*****

Daphne Wysham
www.seen.org
www.ips-dc.org
www.earthbeatradio.org