The World Bank has pledged to bump up its “climate finance” program by one-third, potentially to $29 billion annually, even though its genocidal “green” programs have caused death, desolation, and millions of refugees.
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim (shown) has announced that the World Bank Group plans to boost its spending on “climate finance” by one-third, to as much as $29 billion annually, “to help countries tackle the impacts of climate change and move toward low-carbon growth.” Kim made the announcement on October 9, in Lima, Peru, where the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund were holding their annual meeting with national finance ministers and central bankers.
The funding scale-up, according to the World Bank press release, is being planned in anticipation of world leaders adopting a new global warming compact at the fast-approaching United Nations climate summit in Paris. “The climate meeting will be held in Paris at the end of November and December and aims to strike a global agreement on climate, which includes delivering on a promise to provide developing countries with $100 billion a year in climate financing by 2020,” the release stated, and continued, “The World Bank Group’s announcement responds to developing countries’ calls for new resources to help address climate challenges.”
“We are committed to scaling up our support for developing countries to battle climate change,” Jim Yong Kim said. “As we move closer to Paris, countries have identified trillions of dollars of climate-related needs. The Bank, with the support of our members, will respond ambitiously to this great challenge.”
“From Billions to Trillions”
As we reported recently, the economic costs to finance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which are integrally tied to the UN’s climate hustle, would be astronomical, as is audaciously acknowledged in the World Bank-led report From Billions to Trillions: Transforming Development Finance.
If the UN and its alliance of Wall Street megabanks, global corporatists, the Socialist International, and the major “Green” NGOs have their way, the global accord approved in Paris will impose global carbon taxes, carbon rationing, and carbon credits, the cumulative effect of which will be to transfer trillions of dollars from the middle classes of the developed countries to the banking/corporate elites, the UN, and the corrupt ruling classes of the developing countries.
And if the past is prologue to what we can expect from the UN/World Bank ambitions, there will be a horrendous price in terms of human misery and lives lost from any boost in “climate finance.” Incredibly, while posing as saviors of the poor, officials of the UN and World Bank are culpable for genocidal “climate” policies that have actually killed many people and left millions as homeless refugees.
In an April 21, 2015 article for The New American entitled, “World Bank Schemes Displace Millions of Victims,” foreign correspondent Alex Newman wrote:
World Bank projects dealing with everything from “carbon credits” and “development policies” to crony capitalist “business” deals have forcibly evicted and ruined the livelihoods of millions of people around the world, according to an investigation into the globalist organization’s own documents. A comprehensive review of World Bank records by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and various media outlets revealed that close to 3.5 million of the planet’s poorest people, many of them already struggling just to survive, have been forced off their land and relocated as a direct consequence of policies and projects pursued by the government-backed global lender over the last 10 years. The real figures are probably even higher.
In the above-cited article (and others listed below) Alex Newman has detailed the horrific plight of poor people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who have been victimized by the criminal practices of the World Bank. True “climate justice” would see the top officials responsible for these crimes tried and punished for these offenses, not rewarded with even more power and money.
Immunity and impunity
However, World Bank officials apparently believe they have immunity to act with impunity. And since the U.S. Congress and other national legislatures have not held them accountable thus far, they will undoubtedly continue to push more and more audacious funding schemes. Currently, “climate finance” is the code to riches.
“Currently, 21 percent of the Bank Group’s funding is climate related,” President Jim Yong Kim said, noting that could rise to 28 percent “in response to client demand.” The World Bank Group, he said, “now provides an average of $10.3 billion a year in direct financing for climate action. If current financing levels were maintained, this would mean an increase to $16 billion in 2020.”
In addition, the Bank Group plans to continue current levels of leveraging co-financing for climate-related projects, which, at current financing levels, could mean up to another $13 billion a year. These “investments,” says Kim, who also advocates a global carbon tax, “will boost support for renewable energy and energy efficiency, climate-smart transport solutions, resilient cities, the restoration of degraded forests and landscapes, enhanced water security, and agricultural practices.” Which, like all grandiose UN announcements, sounds glorious, but the reality is invariably disastrous.
In the Lima meeting, Kim called the financing of climate action a “collective challenge…. We all know that country needs for ending extreme poverty and boosting sharing prosperity and combatting climate change are enormous. Together, all of us here will have to find ways to respond to the expected rising demand.”
There is an “expected rising demand” because there’s lots of money to be made from irrational fear of the non-existent anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, or AGW, “crisis.” Non-existent? As we have reported many times previously, even top climate alarmists have now admitted (when cornered) that, despite the non-stop AGW alarmist propaganda to the contrary, the satellite record accurately shows there has been no measurable global warming for nearly 19 years (see here and here).
Climate realists do not totally dismiss the impact of man upon the climate, but point out that anthropogenic impacts are minute in comparison to other natural factors, and it is ludicrous to make the fantastic claims and Al Gore-type nightmare scenarios based on biased computer models and enviro-extremist ideology. “The punch line is this,” Professor Judith Curry recently told Britain’s House of Lords, “Any impact of human caused global warming is lost in the noise of climate variability.”
Dr. Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (and formerly known as the “high priestess of global warming”), now cautions against alarmist claims. “Climate models are very complex, but they are imperfect and incomplete,” she pointed out in an interview with the Daily Mail. “Natural variability [the impact of factors such as long-term temperature cycles in the oceans and the output of the sun] has been shown over the past two decades to have a magnitude that dominates the greenhouse warming effect.”
“It is becoming increasingly apparent,” says Dr. Curry, “that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance.”
Professor Curry is not alone, of course, in voicing this contrarian view to the false “consensus” projected by the UN and its political, academic, and media allies. Esteemed scientists such as Claude Allegre, James Lovelock, Nils-Axel Morner, Hans Von Storch, Richard Lindzen, Timothy Ball, William Happer, Freeman Dyson, John Christy, Roy Spencer, Vincent Gray, Christopher Essex, Fred Singer — and, literally, thousands of other scientists — have been saying the same for years.
However, the World Bank is wedded to climate “experts” that produce the kind of computer models and scary predictions that can be used to demand ever larger funding appropriations for the bank’s supposedly indispensable programs. Foremost among the bank’s experts is German physicist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, lead author for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a top science advisor to the European Union and the German government.
Schellnhuber and the Potsdam Institute prepare many of the World Bank’s climate studies, including the notorious Turn Down the Heat reports that make outrageous claims predicting calamitous results from a theoretical increase in global temperatures of 2 degrees Centigrade.
As with NASA’s Jim Hansen, Schellnhuber’s prestigious appointments have been used to vest the Potsdam Institutes’ pseudo-science with a credibility it does not deserve. The “2-degree tipping point” has become dogma with AGW alarmists, even though Schellnhuber admits it is a political, not a scientific marker. In a 2010 interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel, Schellnhuber candidly acknowledged what many global warming activists fail to understand — and what the World Bank is not about to clear up: that the 2-degree-end-of-the-world “scientific consensus” is a huge lie. The Der SpiegelI article reported:
“Two degrees is not a magical limit — it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated.”
Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.
“Yes, I plead guilty,” he says, smiling. The idea didn’t hurt his career. In fact, it made him Germany’s most influential climatologist. Schellnhuber, a theoretical physicist, became Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief scientific adviser — a position any researcher would envy.
Many other researchers, no doubt, have taken their cues from the rewards lavished on Schellnhuber. Because the cloak of science is an essential prop to sell this colossal grab for global political and economic power, the World Bank, UN IPCC, and national governments continue to richly reward “scientists” who will similarly prostitute themselves for honors, appointments, fame, and worldly wealth.
Photo of World Bank President Jim Yong Kim: AP Images
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