Head Of World Bank (Trump-Nominated) Shows His Ass At COP-27 Climate Conference
David Malpass, the president of the World Bank, arrived at the United Nations climate summit on a mission to prove he and his institution are fully engaged in efforts to curb global warming and assist poor nations battered by increasingly severe droughts, fires and storms. “We are approaching the climate crisis with action and impact,” he said in an address to finance ministers from around the globe on Wednesday morning. “We want to dramatically increase the number and size of projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
But shortly after that speech, Mr. Malpass was on the defensive. After making the remarks at the World Bank pavilion inside the sprawling conference center that is hosting the summit, known as COP27, Mr. Malpass was confronted by a reporter for The Guardian who repeatedly asked, “Are you a climate denier?” Mr. Malpass turned heel. “You know I’m not,” he said, before being escorted away by World Bank staff members.
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Then, in a live interview with The New York Times in September, Mr. Malpass declined to say whether he accepted the scientific consensus that the burning of oil, gas and coal was rapidly warming the planet. “I’m not a scientist,” he said at the time, repeating a talking point often used by climate change deniers. Many leading voices in the climate movement called for his resignation, and some of the bank’s top shareholders expressed concerns about his leadership.
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Last month, Oxfam issued a report that called into doubt the bank’s claims about the extent of its climate work. After conducting an independent audit of what the bank said was its $17.2 billion climate portfolio in 2020, Oxfam said that figure could be off by as much as $7 billion. “The public really knows very little about what the bank is counting as climate financing,” Christian Donaldson, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam, said. “Its reporting is very inadequate.” Another report from a group of advocacy organizations found that since the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which world leaders pledged to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels, the World Bank has spent $14.8 billion supporting fossil fuel projects. The planet, meanwhile, has warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/climate/david-malpass-world-bank-cop27-climate-change.html
