World Bank calls on countries to take urgent steps to protect 'natural capital'

[hatrack]

36. I don't get your lack of reading comprehension

The World Bank is, as it always has, providing capital for enormous and enormously destructive coal-fired power plants.

As the third article points out, even though it talks a good game about how it wants to improve efficiency and provide the best possible technology, the Tata article excerpted above shows that the plant in India won't even approach the best American prompt supercritical plants in terms of pollution output.

More to the point, the World Bank and associated lenders are making possible projects that are going to produce tremendous amounts of GHGs and ocean acidification, and are going to do so for decades to come.

We don't have decades to change course. We need to change course now, and we have a few years left in which to do so. However, good luck telling that to investors in projects like Kusile or Tata. "Stranded costs" - these are the costs that matter to the World Bank and the IMF. Think investors want to hear about how they're going to lose money because of environmental considerations that caused plant shutdowns? Think the World Bank is going to tell them that, or that they'll be hearing the same from the countries where these projects are located? Guess again.

"But natural capital is important", sez the World Bank. "Why, nearly one in every ten dollars of the Kusile loan is going for renewable energy!". So what? If they were serious at all about their new and improved stance on environmental, the ratio would be inverted.

In the mean time, as the World Bank slowly, grudgingly changes its positions (and after all, as you argue, we can only change the system from within!) year after year, decade after decade, millions and millions and millions of tons of more CO2 and mercury will enter the atmosphere from these projects, pollutants that would not otherwise have done so, had the World Bank really been serious about the environment.

In addition, putting a price on natural capital/environmental services provided for nothing by the biosphere is just another step on the road to the Chicago School-ification of everything. Since (as we now know thanks to Freakanomics et. al.) life is nothing but a series of incentives, we may now look forward to clean air bonds, rainforest derivatives and leveraged potable water buyouts. Anything, anything, to keep the economic bacteria growing within the petri dish.