Oh Good! The World Bank Is Helping Poor Nations Set Up Carbon Markets!

[hatrack]

World Bank President Robert Zoellick is set to launch a new multi-million dollar fund in Mexico on Wednesday to help emerging market countries set up their own carbon markets, the bank said on Tuesday. While the list of participating countries is still being finalized, they are expected to include China, Mexico, Chile and Indonesia.

Zoellick will launch the fund in Cancun on Wednesday where countries are involved in global climate negotiations to toughen existing pledges to cut carbon emissions.

EDIT

The fund, which could reach up to $100 million, will provide technical and other support to developing countries to develop their own carbon markets.

Ed. - Ooh!

Zoellick noted that more World Bank member countries are making climate change a priority in their development plans. In 1990, about 10 percent of countries included climate change in such plans. That number has grown to over 80 percent.

http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/60501

[jwirr]

1. Sounds good until you remember that almost all the World Bank

has done so far is help these countries further into debt.

[hatrack]

2. And then Goldman Sachs (or home-grown sociopaths) can find ways to game the markets . . .

And we all know how well that's worked out, thanks to the miracles of mortgage-backed securities and program trading!

:puke:

[Nihil]

3. Thus perpetrating their "winning" strategy ...

... not only pissing people off with regard to anything associated with
"reducing carbon emissions" but making out like thieves in the process
of "business as usual".

:grr:

(ETA: Why did I say "like" in the above? :shrug: )

[Divernan]

4. Money from the World Bank/IMF always comes with strings - LOAN SHARKS!.

Created after World War II to help avoid Great Depression-like economic disasters, the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) are the world's largest public lenders, with the Bank managing a total portfolio of $200 billion and the Fund supplying member governments with money to overcome short-term credit crunches. But the Bank and the Fund are also the world's biggest loan sharks.

When the Bank and the Fund lend money to debtor countries, the money comes with strings attached. These strings come in the form of policy prescriptions called "structural adjustment policies." These policies or SAPs, as they are sometimes called require debtor governments to open their economies to penetration by foreign corporations, allowing access to the country's workers and environment at bargain basement prices.

Example: A loan for highway construction. You will find the roads are required to service plants/locations operated by foreign investors.
I recall one instance where a country were required to privatize water supplies, and one of the requirements was that the native people were not allowed to continue collecting rainwater on their roofs so they'd have to purchase all water from the private company.
Structural adjustment policies mean across-the-board privatization of public utilities and publicly owned industries. They mean the slashing of government budgets, leading to cutbacks in spending on health care and education. They mean focusing resources on growing export crops for industrial countries rather than supporting family farms and growing food for local communities. And, as their imposition in country after country in Latin America, Africa, and Asia has shown, they lead to deeper inequality and environmental destruction.

For decades people in the Third World have protested the way the IMF and World Bank undemocratically impose such policies on their countries. In just the last year, those protests have spread to the power centers of the developed world. In April, some 20,000 people gathered in Washington, DC during the institutions' spring meetings to demand a more democratic kind of international decision-making. Similar protests took place in Prague, Czech Republic in September of that year. By dragging the Fund and the Bank into the light of public scrutiny, the Washington protests re-invigorated a public dialogue about the growing wealth inequalities within and among nations, and they put the institutions on notice that they can't continue business as usual.