January 14, 2008
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has declared climate change a planetary emergency, so why is the World Bank's International Finance Corp. considering the use of scarce development resources to help finance a massive coal-burning plant in India? Worse, writes CGD senior fellow David Wheeler, another UN-affiliated body, the Clean Development Mechanism executive board, has ruled that the giant new plant can actually sell carbon credits, on the grounds that it will be more efficient than several smaller plants that might have been built in instead. "This fatally-dangerous schizophrenia has to end," Wheeler writes. He argues that development funds should instead be shifted immediately to support the promising zero-emission technologies identified in a recent World Bank report.