remember, tuesday is soylent green day
What would happen to the world economy if they knew Soylent Green was made of people?
ENN, via Reuters:
A World Bank proposal to its steering committee to create two new funds to help developing countries generate cleaner, more efficient power is misguided because it backs fossil fuel projects, experts said Monday.
A copy of the report obtained by Reuters argued that current financing from multilateral lenders like the World Bank as well as governments and the private sector "cannot lead to a meaningful transition to a low-carbon economy."
A World Bank official declined to say whether the proposed Clean Energy Financing Vehicle low-interest loans and the Clean Energy Support Fund grants correspond to British finance minister Gordon Brown's call in April for a seed fund of $20 billion for clean energy to invest in alternative energy.
The proposed Clean Energy Financing Vehicle calls for an initial capitalization of $10 billion, the report said.
The two funding ideas endorse low-carbon technologies and carbon emission reductions and were drafted after an original April report. They go to World Bank directors for review Aug. 29 ahead of next month's annual meeting in Singapore.
The progress report also says 10 times as much cash should go to the bank's Global Environment Facility, a 15-year-old grant program to help developing countries fund biodiversity, climate change and land degradation projects, among others.
[snip]
The Washington-based lender reckons every dollar it invests in a project draws $5 from the private sector, government and others and that developing nations need to invest $300 billion a year for the next 25 years to meet their energy needs, largely electric
Nuclear power generation, which caused some controversy in the original report, is mentioned less frequently in the latest version but remains on the table for funding proposals, said Daphne Wysham of the Institute for Policy Studies.
"It (the report) seems to be a random assortment of policies that are a perpetuation of their usual approach, which is to throw a lot of money at large infrastructure projects," Wysham said.
People forget that a critical component - maybe the most critical component - of the oil economy (essentially, the world economy) is the idea of the "petrodollar," where goods and services - often those "large infrastructure projects" Wysham mentions (and more often than not, as weapons and security - the Middle East, according to Stephen Zunes, is our biggest customer for weapons systems and other like toys...) - are exchanged for money to buy oil.
We're slowly getting acclimated to the idea of a greener U.S., but by and large, recipients of IMF/World Bank loans will probably continue to have insanely huge fossil-fuel reliant projects fobbed off on them - conceivably, even when the oil they're reliant on is largely unavailable.
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