Poor nations will struggle with World Bank’s climate change plans

Carl Mortished, World Business Editor: Analysis
You might think that we could do without another big report on climate change but this one from the World Bank is overdue and badly needed. Sadly, it does not have a hope in hell of doing what it says on the title page — Changing the Climate for Development. The World Bank has been trying to eradicate poverty and raise living standards in poor countries since 1946, with meagre success.
Now the good bankers have been given an extra ball to juggle — how to improve the lot of the world’s poorer countries, those where 1.6 billionpeople live on $1 a day, without burning a lot more fossil fuels.
The Bank provides trite answers uttered by others many times before: the need for more public spending on technology, a big commitment by developed countries to curb emissions. More interesting is where the bankers stumble in their effort to grapple with the horrible problem of our age.
The report states blandly that climate change policy “is not a simple choice between a high-growth, high-carbon world and a low-growth, low-carbon world”. Unfortunately, for most of the world’s population that is precisely the choice. Poor countries have limited or no options. Expensive fuel and food mean riots, so the solution is blindingly obvious — growth. Even among the more developed states, China and India, for example, resistance to our attempt to impose a curb on their carbon emissions has been ferocious.
Without infrastructure, without good roads, good government, reliable power and food distribution, poor countries collapse at the first wave and breath of wind. That was brought home in last year’s hurricane season when catastrophic floods devastated impoverished Haiti but the same storms left neighbouring and wealthier Dominican Republic less affected.
Oil and gas infrastructure, power stations, these were the World Bank’s bread and butter, although nuclear power was vetoed back in the 1970s when America’s writ dominated the institutions even more than it does today. The World Bank wants to be greener and it boasts of its investment in renewables. But what we need to know is whether a poor country, such as Bangladesh, can afford to dabble in greenery. Or does it need to build, build, build.