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Is the earth's climate is "tippy?" Recent events -- in geological time -- suggest that the Earth's climate is not very stable, and that highly significant temperature fluctuations can take place over very short periods. Abrupt changes in thermal stratification, convection and the patterns of ocean currents are thought to play an important role. More on cataclysmic climate change.
Rolling Stone article on global warming.
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World Bank facing decision on financing oil and coal projects in developing countries
World Bank on horns of dilemma
Key decision looms on oil, coal funding
Mark Hertsgaard
Sunday, June 6, 2004
Original Article
The World Bank faces a momentous choice: whether to heed an official recommendation to stop financing oil and coal projects in developing countries. The bank's decision will not only affect the fate of millions of people around the world and billions of investment dollars. It will help determine whether our civilization reverses perhaps the greatest threat of the 21st century: catastrophic global climate change.
The decision poses a dilemma for World Bank President James Wolfensohn, for the recommendation to stop funding oil and coal comes from a high-level advisory commission he himself appointed to show that the bank was open to input from civil society and not simply a servant of big corporations, as some activists charged. But Wolfensohn is under pressure from bank management and key member governments, including the United States, to reject the ban. A draft response by management instead urged $300 million to $500 million a year in new funding for coal and oil projects. A vote by the bank's board of directors is expected next month.
The recommendation to quit oil and coal came in January from the Extractive Industries Review Commission. Chaired by Emil Salim, a former environment minister of Indonesia but also a former board member of a coal company, the commission included representatives of industry, unions, developing country governments, indigenous peoples and nongovernmental organizations. Citing the dangers of climate change and the often punishing human rights and pollution effects on local people, the commission urged that the bank halt all coal loans immediately and all oil loans by 2008. It further urged the bank to increase renewable energy loans by 20 percent a year and to grant people the right to veto projects they don't want.
These changes would amount to a virtual revolution in the bank's operations and have an enormous effect on both energy policy and corporate behavior in developing countries. Although the bank provides only a small portion of the financing for a given coal or oil project, its influence is immense, because private corporations see the bank's stamp of approval as a guarantee that their own considerably larger investments will be safe. So if the bank stops funding coal and oil, many projects probably won't go forward.
That's exactly what activists hope.
Between 1992 and 2002, they point out, the World Bank approved more than $24 billion in financing for 229 fossil fuel projects. Over the course of their lifetimes, these projects will generate almost double the amount of carbon dioxide that humanity as a whole produced in 2000.
An elite Pentagon planning unit recently declared that climate change was an urgent national security threat that could cause megadroughts, mass starvation and even nuclear war by 2020. Scientists warn that climate change will punish the world's poor most of all. The World Health Organization estimates that 160,000 people a year already die from the effects of climate change. That number will increase as higher temperatures lower crop yields and expand the range of disease-bearing mosquitoes.
Plight of poor cited
But the plight of the poor is also cited by opponents of the proposed oil and coal ban. Like it or not, they say, oil and coal are the cheapest forms of energy available. To rule them out may sound compassionate, but it will actually keep poor countries poor. "We don't like [the proposal] at all," South Africa's minister of minerals and energy, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, told the New York Times. "We think it takes an ideological approach rather than a practical one."
Unfortunately, most Third World oil and coal projects do local poor people little good. A study by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington found that 81 percent of the World Bank's oil and coal loans went to projects whose output was not consumed at home to build the local economy; rather, that coal and oil was exported to the United States, Japan and other wealthy nations. Thus the poor end up subsidizing the rich.
The World Bank should not be contributing to that perverse outcome. Salim, the commission chair, said in an interview with Reuters that private capital should remain free to pursue oil and coal projects on its own, but the World Bank's funds should be used to promote renewable energy technologies that the market has not yet embraced. Over the past 10 years, the bank's funding for coal and oil has outpaced that for renewable energy sources by a ratio of 17 to 1. Had the bank instead increased funding of renewables by 20 percent a year, as Salim's commission now urges, solar and wind would be much closer to competitiveness today.
More funding promised
The bank claims it is changing course. At a meeting in Bonn, Germany, last week, Peter Woicke, the World Bank Group's managing director, promised a 20 percent annual increase in renewable energy funding. By 2010, Woicke said, this increase would double the bank's current pace of $200 million a year in renewable energy lending. But Steve Kretzman of the Institute for Policy Studies called Woicke's announcement "nothing but spin."
"According to the bank's own numbers it has averaged about $420 million a year in renewable energy during the past 14 years. Now Woicke is promising to reach $400 million a year by 2010. That's going backwards."
In any case, the most urgent short-term focus for the bank is not renewables but energy efficiency. No, it's not sexy. But insulating drafty apartment buildings, replacing old furnaces and motors and installing super- efficient light bulbs is the fastest and cheapest way to "produce" energy in today's world.
Energy efficiency is no silver bullet, but it can be a bridge. It can buy humanity time to get solar, wind, and other green energy sources up and running -- as we must, if we are to meet the great challenge of this century: helping half of humanity to escape from crushing poverty without ruining the ecosystems that make life on Earth possible in the first place.
Mark Hertsgaard is the author of "Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future" and "The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World''.
Copyright The San Francisco Chronicle 2004.
CONTENT COPYRIGHT The San Francisco Chronicle
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