What would you say if someone drove a truck into your house, then jumped out and offered you a loan to help rebuild?
After you stopped screaming at them, which might take a while, you’d demand that they pay for damages that they caused, of course. Over time though, if no one forced the truck driver to pay for the damages, you might be tempted to take the loan. Sure, its a rip-off, but at least you get the money you need to rebuild.
This is exactly what’s happening today with much needed funding for adaptation to climate change impacts in the developing world. The World Bank, backed by Northern taxpayers, is "offering" to loan the developing world the money needed to adapt to climate change impacts.
Ethically, this is abhorrent.
Historically, the U.S. alone is responsible for roughly 30 percent of global warming emissions (with only 5 percent of global population). The richest countries account for 64 percent.
"Adaptation funding is compensation for damages done and, as such, must be given in the form of grants," argues Ilana Solomon of ActionAid USA. "In many cases, a country will have no other option than to take on loans just to access desperately needed funding."
"Instead of having the ‘polluter pay’, with the new World Bank climate resilience fund, the polluter gets paid," said Neil Watkins of Jubilee USA Network.
Noteworthy factoid: The World Bank for many years has been the largest international source of public funding for the fossil fuel industry.
The decision taken by the Bank last Friday, Jan. 30, adds insult to the injury of the Bank’s approval of the use of funds earmarked to help poor countries curb emissions to fund new coal plants (on the theory that they’re slightly cleaner because of this funding).
It also comes amid ongoing controversy about the Bank’s radically increased funding of coal projects.
The question is—will the Obama Administration—which has the loudest voice on the World Bank board—make a difference on these issues? Stay tuned ...
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David Roberts Posted 9:07 am
03 Feb 2009
grist.org
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Russ Posted 7:16 pm
03 Feb 2009
If it's true that disaster capitalism is the practice of swooping in upon the victims of some catastrophe to impose through "shock treatment" (Milton Friedman's own term) the predatory corporatist and neo-feudalist regime they could never achieve by democratic means, then its most extreme and logical manifestation is where you artificially manufacture the disaster with the intent of using it to impose this regime.
Just as we've seen precisely that with resource imperialism, the "Green" revolution, petrodollar recycling, Cold War proxy wars, the drug war, and other gambits, so now we're starting to see the outlines of a carbon war.
The above post provides the basic outline:
The West has already emitted to the point that the climate crisis is upon us, and shows no signs of mitigation.
The globalization cabal, through programs like the so-called Clean Development Mechanism, claims to be seeking mitigation but is actually funding further carbon-intensive development, like the largest coal-fired plants on earth in India.
While the rich West (and other high-emission free riders) clearly has an moral obligation to pay for adaptation measures in the poor countries being hit by the climate crisis, it is instead seizing the opportunity for the standard globalist predatory lending, which loans are always intended to be the lever to indenture the country and loot its resources and labor.
I add to this:
4. Although we still have the old-style denier guttersnipes with us, clearly the sophisticated exploiter view of climate change is that propagated by Lomborg and others, that the best way to deal with it is to "help" the world adapt to it, while "helping" them to industrialize themselves. Once all that's achieved, only then, through some kind of invisible hand, the world will together mitigate emissions, and everything will be fine.
But until then, nothing special regarding emissions should be done. Just the adaptation/industrialization program, which sounds suspiciously like the latest repackaging of the same globalist offensive. You can see how well this dovetails with the World Bank program.
Similarly, there's an attempt among policy advocates to impose a top-down consensus that "offsets" must be an important part of any climate policy. Whether these are preached as intrinsically good (e.g. Mccain and some enviros) or as a necessary political evil (most enviros), the result is the same - a gambit which counteracts mitigation in the industrial countries while helping pry open the privatization door in the non-industrialized (and probably doing little or nothing to mitigate there either).
Finally, we can only speculate on how precisely the malefactors of finance will try to use carbon permit trading (where again, a top-down imposition of "consensus" is being sought) to inflate a new paper bubble.
What is not a matter for speculation is the fact (A) that they will attempt it, and (B) that the government will fully support such a bubble.
[All government monetary and most fiscal policy at this point, as well as almost all commentary, is overwhelmingly focused on just one thing: how to inflate another bubble, since the debt/growth ponzi system cannot survive without it. It really should be called a "bubble economy", and indeed a bubble society.
Right now their preferred goal and conscious policy is to try to reinflate the housing bubble. Thus we have all the focus on trying to "stabilize" the still-inflated housing prices, and send them rising again, when clearly housing prices are seeking a reality-based level and still have a ways to go.
But they'll certainly happily grab hold of any opportunity that comes along. So we can expect permit trading to become a central part of the fray. But it won't work if a rigorous cap is truly enforced. So we can expect ever-more ramified trading, as caps become ever-more gossamer.]
Add this manifestation of the growth imperative to the globalist gambit outlined above, and we have the outlines of a carbon class war from above, at home and abroad, on the people and the earth.
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kyan Posted 4:55 am
04 Feb 2009
The Bank is displaying especially well its short-sighted, profit-driven role in Africa. Africa is the least electrified place in the world, with just a fraction of its citizens benefiting from the miracle of electricity. Solving this huge problem is made more difficult by widespread poverty, poor governance, and because a large majority of Africa's people live far from the grid, which greatly adds to the cost of bringing electricity to them.
Under these vexing conditions, there are no second chances for electrifying Africa: we must get it right. Yet the World Bank and many of the continent's energy planners are pinning their hopes for African electrification on something as ephemeral as the rain, by pushing for a grid of large dams across the continent.
To read more about this and viable alternative solutions, see "The Wrong Climate for an African Dam Boom" at http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/node/3825.
http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/blog/katy-yan
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