“Climate change and the coal issue is one thing,” [World Bank President Jim Young Kim] said, “but the humanitarian issue is another, and we cannot turn our backs on the people of Kosovo who face freezing to death if we don’t move in.”
The Washington Post reports:
One of the more significant lines in President Obama’s climate-change speech this week got relatively scant notice. In a major policy shift, Obama said he would place sharp restrictions on U.S. government financing for new coal plants overseas…
A big early test case for both the White House and the World Bank will come in Kosovo, which is planning to build a new 600-megawatt plant fired by lignite coal, a particularly carbon-intensive fuel. The U.S. Agency for International Development has provided technical assistance to Kosovo over the years, and the World Bank is deciding whether to provide loan guarantees for the project.
In an April teleconference, Kim discussed the Kosovo project and noted that tension can often arise between tackling global poverty and cutting carbon emissions so as to avoid severe global warming.
“Climate change and the coal issue is one thing,” Kim said, “but the humanitarian issue is another, and we cannot turn our backs on the people of Kosovo who face freezing to death if we don’t move in.” He added, however, that the World Bank is currently studying whether there were viable cleaner-energy alternatives for Kosovo.
If you look into the belief’s of these folks, you will find many of them believe we need significantly reduced population to cure the world’s environmental ills. Poverty and energy poverty is one way to keep the population down.
If I’m tracking this correctly, the World Bank is demanding that we subsidize in poor countries what the Bank is trying to end in industrial countries. Good plan, that.
Obama’s climate policy isn’t about helping the poor. In fact it drives the poor further down. Radical environmentalisim has never been about the welfare of humanity. Surprising the World Bank Pres doesn’t know that?