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Funding Country Prosperity and Self-Reliance vs. Climate Mitigation

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The news from a climatist perspective is reported in the LinkedIn article World Bank and IMF Retreat from Climate Finance Under US Pressure.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In a significant shift in global financial priorities, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) appear to be scaling back their commitments to climate finance in 2026, likely influenced by pressure from the United States. This development, reported in mid-2025, has sparked concerns among environmental advocates, developing nations, and the business community about its potential to disrupt the global transition to a sustainable economy. Climate finance, which funds projects aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change, is critical for supporting renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, and climate resilience initiatives. [ Note: The United States is the largest shareholder of the World Bank, controlling about 16% of voting power. This allows the U.S. to single-handedly block any decision that requires a supermajority, such as extending or replacing the climate financing targets.]

Reorientation Background from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent

Excerpts from Secretary Bessent IMFC-DC Statement in italics with my bolds and added images.

In recent years, the IMF has suffered from mission creep. Its work has too often extended into areas such as international development, climate change, gender, and social issues, which are disconnected from the institution’s core mandate. To restore its relevance and impact, the Fund must drop these extraneous items and focus on the critical economic work at hand. 

As part of the ongoing Comprehensive Surveillance Review (CSR), the IMF is taking important steps to better calibrate the scope of its surveillance and reverse these concerning trends. Through the ongoing Review of Program Design and Conditionality, we expect the IMF to reemphasize a culture focused on achieving successful program outcomes rather than prioritizing inputs, such as the volume of financing provided.

In a more constrained external financing environment, the IMF should promote domestic revenue mobilization, better governance, and policies that support durable, private sector-led growth.  Moreover, the IMF, together with the World Bank, must continue its efforts to improve debt data reporting, help build debt management capacity for borrowing countries, restore momentum in debt-restructuring processes, and advance progress under the Common Framework.

The World Bank must maintain focus on its core mission of reducing poverty and increasing economic growth. This means:

♦ Promoting a stronger development agenda focused on country self-reliance by directing resources to the countries most in need for foundational investments that increase productivity and growth and graduating countries from Bank support;
♦ Delivering access to all technologies which can provide abundant, reliable, and affordable energy;
♦ Promoting prudent macroeconomic management and the rule-of-law; and improving development outcomes by proactively seeking to expand competition in procurement.
♦ Striving for greater efficiency, discipline, and accountability so that every dollar delivers more impact.

The Bank must do more to advance developing country access to abundant, affordable, and reliable energy to support economic growth and poverty reduction. Energy abundance sparks economic abundance, and the World Bank should support an all-of-the-above approach to energy technologies—including fossil fuels such as gas, oil, and coal, rather than restrict borrower choice. We call on the Bank to further expand its support for affordable, reliable energy by removing constraints on its support for natural gas and increasing the number of gas projects in the pipeline. We continue to welcome the Bank’s removal of the prohibition on financing nuclear power generation last year. We further welcome the Bank’s leadership in a working group on nuclear energy development with other multilateral development banks. Financing that delivers energy abundance will provide a strong boost to growth, which will also support debt sustainability.

Focusing on the Bank’s core mission also means abandoning its distortionary 45% climate finance target, which impedes market efficiency, distorts incentives, and undermines efforts to reduce poverty and spur economic growth. We welcome the coming expiration of the Climate Change Action Plan, and upon its long-overdue expiration, expect the Bank to immediately shift its myopic focus on climate and financing volumes to one that emphasizes high-quality, durable projects rather than shaping and selecting projects to chase arbitrary financing targets that do little to lift people out of poverty. The Bank should turn its attention to whether its investments and the countries they support are resilient to a multitude of shocks, rather than to meeting nonsensical arbitrary targets.

As public institutions, the World Bank and IMF can most clearly demonstrate accountability to their shareholders by ensuring that a sharper focus on their respective core missions is also reflected by restrained budgets. In service of this goal, we are pleased that both institutions have proposed flat real administrative budget growth for the upcoming fiscal year alongside streamlining efforts that will help reverse the mission creep of recent years.

More than eight decades after their creation at Bretton Woods, we must ensure that the international financial institutions remain true to their mandates and fit for purpose. Streamlining policy priorities will allow both the World Bank and IMF to focus limited public resources on effectively fulfilling their core mandates while nimbly responding to crises. The United States will continue to work with Management and staff, as well as other shareholders, to advance these priorities.

 

 

Unhinged Climate Celebs: Krugman and Cusack

Posted on by Ron Clutz

David Simon writes at Real Clear Markets Paul Krugman Is a Global Warming Alarmist. Don’t Be Like Him. Excerpts in italics with my bolds

In 2004, TheGuardian.com reported a secret Pentagon warning about global warming: “major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.”

In 2008, Al Gore announced that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in five years.”

In 2009, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon declared that “[t]he world has less than 10 years to halt the global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet.”

All wrong.

Yet the supposedly authoritative statements of global warming doom continue. In a January 3, 2020 column titled “Apocalypse becomes normal”, Paul Krugman in his usual understated way told us that “[o]n our current trajectory, Florida as a whole will eventually be swallowed by the sea” and “[m]uch of India will eventually become uninhabitable.”

Krugman makes the same mistake as other false prophets of global warming doom. His and their predictions are works of science fiction because, contrary to scientific principles, they ignore the facts about global warming’s actual impact.

The facts instead show that global warming is a non-problem that warrants no action.

First, the earth’s temperature has been rising at a microscopically slow pace. NASA’s data set for global temperatures goes back to 1880 and shows that since that year, the earth’s temperature has risen by only 1.14° C. An increase of 1.14° C over 139 years translates to an average increase of only 0.008° C per year.

Second, a warmer earth saves lives. In 2015, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet reported that worldwide, cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. A group of 22 scientists examined over 74 million deaths in the United States, China, Brazil, and ten other countries in 1985-2012. They found that cold caused 7.29 percent of these deaths, while heat caused only 0.42 percent. And of these temperature-related deaths, “moderately hot and cold temperatures” caused 88.85 percent of the deaths, while “extreme” temperatures caused only 11.15 percent.

Third, while the earth’s temperature has risen, the number of natural disaster deaths has been sharply declining. In 2019, EMDAT, The International Disaster Database, reported that since the 1920s, the number of people killed annually by natural disasters has declined by over 80 percent. And this happened as the world’s population quadrupled from less than two billion to over seven and half billion.

My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT

Fourth, the global air pollution death rate has fallen by almost 50 percent since 1990. In 2019, University of Oxford economist Max Roser and researcher Hannah Ritchie reported in Our World in Data that “since 1990 the number of deaths per 100,000 people have nearly halved.”

Fifth, any impact on the economy is likely to be minimal. In 2019, the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that if the earth’s temperature rises by 0.01° C per year through 2100 – 25 percent faster than it actually has since 1880 – total U.S. GDP in 2100 will be 1.88 percent lower in 2100 than it would otherwise be.

But the Congressional Budget Office in 2019 projected that in 2100, GDP per person will be about 180 percent higher (based on its projection of a 1.3 percent annual real long-term potential labor force productivity growth rate). So even if the reduction that NBER estimates pans out, GDP per person will still be about 178 percent higher.

In other words, per person income in 2100 will be almost triple today’s level, regardless of global warming.

Finally, restricting carbon emissions to attempt to stop global warming is the wrong path – even the most severe restrictions will have almost zero impact on the earth’s temperature. Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels calculated that if the United States eliminated all carbon emissions – which would not only require Americans to give up fossil fuels, but also to stop breathing (to cease exhaling carbon dioxide) – it would only reduce global warming by a negligible 0.052° C by 2050.

Don’t make the same mistake as Krugman and other false prophets of global warming doom. Check the facts. Global warming has not been harmful and presents no danger to future generations.

And then there’s John Cusack.  Zachary Leeman writes at RT:  Cusack, Bernie’s prophet of doom: Only 10-12 years to stop climate change & ‘predatory capitalism’.  Excerpts is italics with my bolds.

It appears actor John Cusack took the climate change messages in his film ‘2012’ really, really seriously, because he says Earth only has a handful of years left — unless Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is elected US President.

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Introducing Sanders in Exeter, New Hampshire, on Saturday, the 53-year-old actor threw out a doomsday scenario where the world only has a “10 to 12 year window” to reverse the effects of climate change and combat the “predatory capitalism” that is supposedly fueling it.

“The billionaires are getting nervous and all the corporate media is — they hate us, they don’t hate us, they’re confused. And it seems like every conceivable power structure on Earth is trying to kill or derail our movement, but we’re still here,” Cusack announced to the assembled Sanders supporters.

“We know this form of capitalism takes and takes; it takes whatever, whenever, however it wants. It’ll take our lives, it’ll take our labor, our spirit, our air and water, even our earth.”

Cusack’s climate change fear-mongering may have played to the crowd of Bernie supporters, but he isn’t flipping many votes, judging by the wider reaction on social media.

“The self-awareness of @johncusack is undetectable with an electron microscope,” actor and director Nick Searcy tweeted in response to Cusack’s speech.

‘Full Metal Jacket’ actor Adam Baldwin questioned whether Cusack is suggesting war with China with his doomsday prediction, considering the country leads the United States in CO2 emissions.

Others criticized Cusack, who endorsed Sanders for president in February of last year, for his focus on criticizing capitalism and the “one percent of the one percent,” when he has himself become wealthy from his work in capitalist Hollywood.

Tom Elliott tweet: 

Actor John Cusack lecturing those in the bottom 99%

Gosh advice from Hollywood is always welcomed

Footnote:  If you want to talk about predatory capitalism, consider the billions raked in by Big Wind and Big Solar moguls.  See The End of Wind and Solar Parasites

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