remember, tuesday is soylent green day (wednesday can be tuesday too edition)
The World Bank's done the same thing with reports on Soylent Green! Even though it's made of people!
The Independent UK:
The Bush administration has consistently thwarted efforts by the World Bank to include global warming in its calculations when considering whether to approve major investments in industry and infrastructure, according to documents made public through a watchdog yesterday.
On one occasion, the White House's pointman at the bank, the now disgraced Paul Wolfowitz, personally intervened to remove the words "climate change" from the title of a bank progress report and ordered changes to the text of the report to shift the focus away from global warming.
But the issue predates Mr Wolfowitz's appointment as president of the bank in June 2005. According to the Government Accountability Project (GAP), which has tracked efforts to censor debate on global warming, environmental specialists at the World Bank tried unsuccessfully to press for consideration of greenhouse- gas emissions in a paper written - but never published - in 2002.
[snip]
The GAP has uncovered evidence of one striking instance of Bush administration censorship. In 2006, the bank's vice presidents responded to a request from the Group of Eight industrialised countries and commissioned a draft report entitled Climate Change, Energy and Sustainable Development: Towards an Investment Framework. They endorsed the report, according to the minutes of a meeting obtained by the GAP.
Subsequently, however, Mr Wolfowitz's office put out a memo asking the team to rework the paper, "shifting from a climate lens mainly to a clean-energy lens". The edited paper issued a few months later was eventually called Clean Energy and Development: Towards an Investment Framework.
The World Bank has come under fire from environmental groups for a number of decisions, including a recent grant to develop lignite mining and power plants in Kosovo. Lignite - or brown coal - pollutes the air heavily when burnt and is generally regarded as one of the dirtiest fuel sources on the planet.
The investment appears to go against the bank's own policy, from 2001, whereby it decided to try to phase out oil and gas investments by 2008 and to extend an existing moratorium on investments in coal mining.
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