The New York Times and the UK's Guardian reported on Tuesday that China and India have joined the Copenhagen Accord, a non-binding statement released in December at the end of the Copenhagen climate conference.
It’s a bit odd that you can be one of the fortunate few to attend the current round of international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, and still have to read the newspaper to find out how things are going.
What is it going to take to get the World Bank to change course on renewable energy? Here at the Center we’ve been trying to help get the bank to be more aggressive on renewables for nearly a year. But inertia is a powerful force, and despite shifts in thinking by individual bank staff, the institution itself is still moving very slowly. But what if a major client and a competitor joined forces on renewables?
Nobel laureate Steve Chu reportedly will head the Department of Energy, a huge win for solar power. Chu is a real visionary, and solar is first on his list, so we're sending him a copy of a brand new working paper (posted today!) by David Wheeler and Kevin Ummel called Desert Power: The Economics of Solar Thermal Electricity For Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
This is a joint posting with Vijaya Ramachandran
The World Bank Group's board appears to be operating under a severe case of cognitive dissonance, supporting efforts to save tigers - threatened in India and Bangladesh by habitat loss due to climate change - while helping build coal-fired power plants that will only speed up this process.
Back in June the Bank launched a campaign to help governments develop and better manage forests inhabited by endangered tigers, including in the Sunderbans. This massive mangrove forest spans the India-Bangladesh border and is home to the Bengal tiger. While the Bank has a less-than-stellar conservation track record in Sunderbans, more important is the fact that this impoverished World Heritage site would be one of the hardest hit by climate change, whether from rising sea levels or the disappearance of the glacier that feeds the Ganges river.
But the Bank's commitment to poverty reduction and biodiversity stands in stark contrast to its bread-and-butter financing choices. As the Bank planned its save-the-tiger campaign, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Bank's private sector arm, was putting together a deal to finance $450 million of the misguided $4+ billion Tata Mundra Ultra Mega coal-fired plant in India. Financing 10% of the cost of a plant being built by India's largest company will help propel India's power sector emissions to third highest in the world within a few years, behind China and the U.S. Is this a smart use of scarce international public resources?
Burma in the wake of Cyclone Nargis is a laundry list of development failures:
