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You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got Kyle Ash, who is with the Bank Information Center, director of policy and strategy and advocacy. They’re also works with the US Climate Action Network. Welcome to the program. Kyle.

Thank you, Matt. Glad to be on the show.

Okay, tell us a little bit about the Bank Information Center. And what you all do, I’d read on your website that you advocate for transparency, accountability, sustainability, and inclusion and development. Finance. That’s a mouthful. What what does that mean in in reality,

so the the Bank Information Center, we have been around since the 1980s, based in Washington, DC, we’re a nonprofit that was founded to really keep an eye on the World Bank at first, which is a multilateral development bank that helps to provide financing to, to developing countries. The World Bank is one of many multilateral development bank’s now.

So over the years, we’ve come to focus on a lot of them that the issue with the World Bank and other MDBs is that they’re really not accountable to voters to people on the ground, whether you’re talking about in countries like the US, which provides a lot of the budget for the lending that they do, or regular people on the ground where they actually do projects.

And you could be talking about any kind of projects, a COVID, 19, Health Response project or a road project or a dam, any number of things. So we really were founded to try and help to inform people on the ground about what’s happening with World Bank activities, and to help them provide input to the bank if we feel like we can help with social environmental protection.

So how do you do that? And which projects do you focus on because I assume the World Bank has lots of projects going around across the planet, and it probably takes a heck of a lot of resources to monitor every single project that the World Bank is doing? Correct?

It does. And we’re a pretty small shop, we’re only about 20 people. So the first thing we try and do is look for our value add, there’s a number of other organizations around the world that also help. So these are partner organizations and other countries that really help try to democratize development, finance, and would focus on the World Bank and other multilateral development bank’s, so we work closely with them and keep each other informed about what’s happening.

You know, we can’t focus on every single bank project. In any given time, we’re probably monitoring about 30 or 40 projects on the ground with local partners in various countries. So how it could happen that we monitor a project is, we have a partner in, say, in the Ivory Coast, would be hearing that there’s going to be a well being project and have some concerns and they go to a local nonprofit there.

And then they would already know about us, because we’ve been doing the work over the years and will reach out to us and ask if we can help and so that, in a sense, we are sort of like the bank says demand driven in terms of where we focus. But then we’ll also come to focus on projects sometimes where we know there’s a big gap. And you focus a lot on climate on your show. And so the World Bank and other public banks don’t have a great record when it comes to climate change.

So it’s something that we’re keeping an eye on, and they say they’re going to be integrating climate into their projects and into their policies a lot more. And so we come to look at their projects and their policies from that perspective too.

Well tell us about some wins that your organization has had in terms of redirecting the World Bank and other multilateral lenders. And also maybe some of the challenges ahead in terms of projects that are on the horizon for from these lenders that don’t work very climate friendly.

Probably the biggest single victory was the establishment of the environmental and social protection framework is the World Bank. So they have the World Bank has existed since the end of World War II was really set up to help countries mostly in Europe, develop after all the destruction of World War II. And so that was between the 40s in the 70s really focusing on Europe, a lot of that and since then, has kind of expanded its portfolio and focused on the rest of the world.

And for a long time really just focused on What the western countries what the US predominantly prioritize in economic development, which was free trade, developing industries for exports, so to actually earn money on the global market, they weren’t thinking about things like social environmental safeguards. So they weren’t thinking about making sure people with disabilities had access to public transit, they weren’t thinking of impacts on freshwater as a result of big agricultural projects.

But in the 70s, and 80s, there started to be a lot of focus on that. And they developed some basic safeguards for the environment and, and workers and communities on the ground. But there are big gaps. And so the Bank Information Center and our partners pushed the World Bank for a long time to improve their their social environmental safeguards framework.

And then 2017, they did come up with a final, really good robust framework doesn’t include everything, but the biggest victory. And the new safeguards was that for every project, the bank now has to do a social engagement plan where they go out and they proactively find which stakeholders will be impacted by this project, and make sure that they are getting input from those stakeholders to mitigate any impacts that may come up or to reduce the impacts and prevent them before even going into it. There’s not a panacea, of course, and now isn’t all the bank financing.

There’s other components of bank financing that aren’t covered by this, but it’s definitely a big victory and sort of felt to encourage other multilateral development bank’s to develop similar policies. Well,

I know coming out of last years COP26, there was some talk that, that the banking industry might lead the way towards, you know, in the environmental movement, if it if it adopted standards that were pro climate. And have we seen a radical shift in the way banks are financing projects, or is that just hype and fluff coming out of COP26.

So what we have seen as a radical shift and how they talk about it, but I wouldn’t just blow that off. We’ve also seen some shifts on paper where we haven’t seen as actually a huge shift in how they spend their money. I first got involved in pushing on World Bank energy policy, after the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009. They were still funding coal fired power plants.

And there was a lot of pushback from the bank about not doing that anymore. We’ve come a long way since that, to the point where now, the World Bank is saying that they’re going to be phasing out support for all fossil fuels, whether it’s a coal fired power plant, or extracting oil and gas, to produce it for power plants down the line. So they’ve come around into admitting that there was a problem that they’ve had a role in the problem, but we haven’t seen yet as a massive shift in their financing. But, but it’s important that they do it.

And the reason why we don’t blow him off and just say that it’s rhetoric is that the World Bank is one of the largest sources of climate finance. So because big countries with a lot of money like the US, and countries in Europe, partners in Europe are not providing enough to help developing countries deal with the climate crisis, whether it’s to develop sustainably and not have as high emissions as the US did historically.

Or to actually be more resilient in the face of climate impacts, like rising sea levels, unbearable heat waves, any number of things, it’s already starting to happen. And so the US and other big donors have started to lean more and more on banks, including the World Bank to provide this climate finance commitment. So we need we need that money. But we also need it to be real and have a real impact. So it has to be more than just what the bank says, or what they describe on paper. But we actually need to see shifts in that money. And we haven’t seen that quite yet.

So you’re saying that even since 2009, in the intervening 13 years, the World Bank is still lending a substantial portion of their funds to fossil fuel companies. And And have we seen any decline in the rate at which their funding kind of high emitting polluting development, we have seen a decline for sure, on the fossil fuels. What we haven’t seen is a commitment in terms of a policy where they will never do it again. So that the bank thinks that it hasn’t funded coal at all for the last several years. We’ve been seeing them talk about that, I think they say since 2012.

But in fact, they they have it’s just that they haven’t tracked it fully. So I mentioned before that most of the attention has been on what they call project financing. So like the bank will actually fund a coal fired power plant, right? That would be a project, project financing. There’s also this other type of lending the bank does called development policy financing, which is basically budget support or government will come to them or client government and say they would like this amount of money. And the bank says, Okay, well, at an exchange, you have to commit to these policies.

Well, some of those policies actually help fossil fuel development. So if you look at the overall amount of lending, that the banks providing for the fossil fuel industry, it has not disappeared, and there’s still plenty of it. And, and and there’s even talk about doing more when it comes to to gas or when it comes to other things that they think are going to be good for the climate, but actually bad, like carbon capture and sequestration projects, which are actually enhanced oil recovery projects.

So in terms of this development, funding support that the World Bank is giving to countries that help their fossil fuel industries, what is being done to slow that down? And is the US putting any pressure on them as a Biden administration changed anything regarding its support, or its oversight on the World Bank in the last few years? Yeah.

So we’ve seen some really good things from the Biden administration. Namely, the one of the first things he did when he became president was to issue a couple of executive orders. And one of them created the stage for a guidance that the Treasury Department issued on how the US will use its voice and vote. And the multilateral development bank’s like the World Bank when it comes to fossil fuel projects. So not really the US has to vote against fossil fuel projects for the most part.

And has that changed the results? Or are the European countries doing the same? And if the Europeans and the US vote in the direction towards not funding fossil fuel projects, or is that enough in the way of voting to shift the balance of power?

So it’s kind of a long answer, probably, for the next segment. It’s, it’s shifted the politics for sure. Is the is the first thing to say. Okay, well, we’ll come back to it after the break. This is Matt Matern, your host to A Climate Change. And I’ve got Kyle Ash with the Bank Information Center. We’ll be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, and I’ve got Kyle Ash, who’s with the Bank Information Center, director of policy and strategy. Kyle, just asking you about how the US directives for its representatives and voting shares at the World Bank have changed anything in in recent years.

So there’s a political answer. And there’s an answer in terms of has it actually shifted, how the money is spent. And I think that the US policy on how it votes and the World Bank is influential on that. It’s one of many types of policies that we need to have. So since the US has come out with this policy, I’ve heard of a similar one from France and from Germany and from the UK.

And so things are moving in the right direction, it needs to happen more than just at the World Bank and other multilateral development bank’s. We just came out of the UN climate talks. There’s all sorts of policies that they’re talking about, that we need, we need everything. But if you’re just to talk about how the World Bank is spending its money. I think both that type of policy and how the board votes on projects when they come up, is needed, but we also need the outside pressure.

And the World Bank is feeling that more. I think we saw a lot of that when the president of the Royal Bank, John Malpass, was not able to answer very eloquently, whether he thought the climate crisis was an issue for the bank. Go a lot of people went after him for call it saying that he wasn’t a scientist using that climate denier talking point.

And he backtracked on that, and it for sure, did not represent the bank’s position as an institution, but really just underscored that he did not take the climate crisis as a priority, which is a big problem, since the World Bank is the largest source of climate finance.

Give us a little bit of a sense of how much lending the World Bank actually does.

So that’s a good question. It’s not the largest source of public finance, for sure. It probably does something on the order of 10s of billions of dollars per year or more. It depends on which part of the bank you’re talking about. For the most part, we’re talking about the part of the bank that’s focused on Project lending or budget support lending.

But what they do which is more influential than the amount of money is Pioneer investments. So they will de risk projects where we really need to see investment mobilize. So it will be the first investor. And a lot of projects, say, you want to have a big wind farm or a big solar farm in a country where there is no wind or solar.

And the government in that country could not get a loan or financing at all, from any other source there, we’ll start with the World Bank, well, if the World Bank provides that financing, that will bring in other types of finance, so they really do mobilize finance in the right direction, but they can also mobilize it in the wrong direction.

So we no longer just focused on the World Bank, because it’s not the only source of money. But we still prioritize it, because it does set the stage for where money will go in the future. So in terms of big projects that the World Bank is doing, has it focused some or substantial sum of its lending towards things like wind and solar, in the last decade or so?

It’s definitely doing more of it. I think, if you were to look at the numbers, it’s, it’s still a paltry sum. There, they’re, you know, they’re having to distribute their investments across lots of different sectors. And I think part of the reason why they don’t do more is they, they say they’re demand driven. So they won’t go into a country and say, We would like you to finance this.

They, they sometimes promoted in conversation, and they convene meetings around issues, to try and drum up interest. But in the end, they will have to move forward with the project where there’s actually interest already in the country to do that project. So I think that’s part of the reason why we sometimes we will criticize them for just being rhetorical and not actually doing.

But it is true that in some cases, they do have to wait until they actually get a proposal coming to them. Because some one of their clients is actually requesting financing. For this, they can’t promote a specific project.

So kind of circling back to a question I had earlier. But we didn’t drill down on too much, which is, in terms of the banking industry. Do you see any kind of what what do you see we talked, you said there was a rattle, radical shift in the talk, they were the way they’re talking about lending? What are we seeing in terms of the way they’re actually lending that’s different and more environmentally focused and less money towards fossil fuels.

Hopefully, for the most part, the discussion has not been about what they do, but about what they don’t do. I think from the climate perspective, and the bank is guilty of this, as well as I think nonprofits who’ve been focused on bank financing is that we mostly focus on the energy sector. So we’re talking about fossil fuels, we’re talking about not financing coal, oil and gas for electricity production. I think that’s been what people have mostly been talking about.

The bank has been moving in the right direction in terms of shifting outside of that type of financing, with the caveats of gas projects, and now potentially, on the rise in projects that are in the name of carbon capture and storage. We have also seen a sort of an incremental increase in funding for wind and solar. And the public sector arm of the bank, the private sector arm of the bank was the International Finance Corporation, where they’re actually lending to companies.

And instead of governments, we’ve seen a much greater increase there in terms of its renewables financing. So that’s been good. It’s been moving in the right direction. One big gap has been transportation. And so this is a good example of where right now we’re still in the rhetorical phase. Because the World Bank and other MDBs have really pushed this conversation about transportation, decarbonisation, we need to, we need to make sure that cars and buses and trucks are no longer spewing carbon dioxide into the air.

This is close to a quarter of global CO2 from energy use is coming from transportation. So it’s something that we can’t ignore. The Bank Information Center last year started to really look at this at the World Bank, and the Inter American Inter American Development Bank, IDB and found that there, despite what they have been saying, it’s still predominantly financing projects that support the internal combustion engine, instead of zero emissions vehicles, zero emissions vehicle infrastructure.

So they’re, they’re still really just talking around this, including promoting vehicle electrification sometimes, but the financing is really still predominately going towards regular cars, Diesel versus large emitting trucks, even though there are alternatives available.

Well, I might from your answer. I’m discerning that you’re talking mostly about the World Bank and development bank’s. My question maybe is more pointed at private bank In the private banking industry, have you seen any shift in the way they’re funding projects along those same lines.

So you mean in terms of like Wells Fargo or US Bank, I have not focused on private sector lending so much. Which is maybe ironic, because one of the reasons that I even got into this sort of work is from working in private mortgage lending a long time ago, one of my first jobs outside of food and service was to work in the mortgage lending sector, not long after the first, I know the second Bush administration deregulated that sector.

And I worked in real estate loans and worked in taxes and insurance, to help companies flip properties that had been foreclosed on and make money off of them real quick. And so I realized the benefit. I mean, that wasn’t how I was trained, I was raised to be, I was in a very religious household and kind of raised to be a missionary, I think so I was supposed to be an advocate. And I was supposed to be promoting things that were good for the community.

So I had to get out of that. And now I’m really just focused on public policy, but on public banks. So I think that our theory of change is that the interest from private banks will follow where public banks are investing, public banks are going to be investing in places that may not have as lucrative return. I have a lot of colleagues that do focus on the private sector as well.

And they that is what they’re saying, you’re seeing a lot of investments going to places that have been de risked by public funders, like the World Bank, or like bilateral financers, like the Development Finance Corporation or the US export import bank.

Well, let’s let’s look turn our attention to the Belt and Road Initiative that the Chinese government has been pushing to extend China’s influence has that been something that your organization has monitored at all, not so much. The politics around China and public financing and climate is something that we’re sort of keeping an eye on, but I’m really tracking it in terms of the day to day and how it’s actually influencing public policy right now.

Because we we know that the Chinese are funding a lot of coal plants around the world in particular, I saw recently, they were funding a number of coal plants in Pakistan, which was the site of that horrific flood last year, which is, you know, kind of a tragic situation is that they’re committing more resources to destroy the environment.

And, you know, the Himalayas are going to, you know, melt down and cause huge floods as well as destroy the water supply for a few billion people. Is there anything that we should be doing to stop this? Or what could we it is a series of tragedies, I think that one of the problems, which exists in this case, but also exists, in case of whether you’re talking about us funded project, or a lot of World Bank funded project in the energy sector is that, that, especially after a crisis, you see an immediate need for people to have power, and you do whatever’s cheapest right now to provide it to them.

And I can see the need to do that. from a humanitarian perspective, I think that there’s ways to do it, which don’t have as long lasting impacts as a brand new coal plant, which could be putting CO2 into the atmosphere for the next 40 or 50 years, or even longer.

So the question is about stranded assets from a financing perspective, do we want to build things that we’re just going to have to get rid of the next five or 10 years or sooner? And it seems probably in everyone’s best interest to do something that maybe cost a little bit more right now, and can still provide that need immediately?

I think that makes sense. Well, you’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, and our guests, Kyle Ash from the Bank Information Center. We’ll be right back after this break.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And I’ve got Kyle Ash from the Bank Information Center on the program. Kyle was the World Bank important when it comes to the climate crisis?

So I think the first thing to say is that there, at least they say the largest source of climate finance, and this is the public money driven to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help communities adapt to climate crises. The there’s a question about whether this is actually the case that they are right now the largest source, but they could be. And I put it that way, because Oxfam is a nonprofit that’s focused on climate finance and And the human rights.

They published a report a few months ago that showed actually the bank has been exaggerating on the what actually, you could call a climate finance project or not how the bank does this is essentially that they will finance the project. And then they will calculate if it has a cool benefit in terms of reducing climate pollution or helping with resilience of communities where they did that project. And it’s they haven’t really published any metrics on how they’re calculating these co benefits.

And so, Oxfam did this report, where they looked at how they could surmise the bank was doing these calculations to see if they came up with the same numbers, and found that it seemed like the bank was exaggerating by around 40% in the amount of money on climate finance, the so backing up what is climate finance in their Copenhagen Climate Conference and night 2009.

That was the first climate conference, I went to the global community, developing countries and nongovernmental organizations, I worked for Greenpeace at the time, we were asking for $100 billion in climate finance.

And this was to be grants, so not money that was going to in debt countries further, but it was supposed to be grants, and it was supposed to be used to help countries adapt to the climate crisis, which they were not causing. It was a climate crisis caused by larger matters, like the US that were responsible for the most of the pollution in the atmosphere causing climate change. And what they got was $100 billion commitment coming out of Copenhagen.

But only some amount of it would be for adaptation, some other amount would be to help countries develop sustainably, which is fine, but it was unclear where the money would come from, it would be grants, that would be loans. And over the years, 2009 is now a long time ago in terms of these climate commitments, it’s become pretty clear that number $100 billion dollars isn’t enough. Number two, that countries like the US are not going to pony up.

And what they’ve been doing is instead leaning on institutions like the World Bank, to provide the money for this commitment. And now the World Bank and other multilateral development, banks are actually providing about a third of global public climate finance. So we need that money, but we also need it to work. So we need reporters like Oxfam, to put pressure on the bank to actually show that they are providing climate finance is actually helping to reduce emissions and actually helping countries to adapt.

But we also need that overall amount of money to go out because the need is probably, you know, well over a trillion dollars that’s needed not, not 100 billion, which is supposed to be 100 billion per year, in terms of the US is commitment and what it’s spending, there was an enormous bill that was passed through Congress that that arguably, was climate finance, or certainly encouraged a greener economy. How much of that would you count towards the US is, you know, need to be a part of the solution.

So whether it is part of the solution for providing climate finance, towards the UN commitment that the US made? None of it is the answer for that. I mean, that, I think maybe stepping back and thinking about how what is the US role to play in all of this, and part of it is about money. The US more than any other country can help provide public finance to countries who will be struggling with the climate crisis who are already struggling with the climate crisis.

But the reality is one of the two political parties in the US Congress refuses to approve any money for those communities in other countries, right. And so you weren’t going to see any money like that. And the IRA, we had a zeroing out of the US contribution to the Green Climate Fund, which was the fund established also after the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

But yes, the US can help contribute to climate change even domestically, or contribute to the response to the climate crisis. And we need to help countries adapt in the US as well, not just to provide money to people outside of the US. So the IRA helps to do those types of things.

We do need to do that. The biggest, I think, in fact, from the perspective of helping to respond to the climate crisis with Ira was to actually move the US in the direction of not contributing much as much climate pollution here, but here in terms of how do we come up with a plan and what’s needed, you referenced a trillion dollar number.

I’ve seen a number of books written whether it’s by Bill Gates or John Doerr wrote one about kind of his plan. What’s the definitive plan for for solving the crisis and how much money is needed to effectuate that plan?

So I think you can put me in the camp of folks who would not put a specific number on how much climate finance is needed. And one in one reason is that it’s not zero sum. You can have money for climate finance, that reduces emissions and helps communities adapt, that also does other things. So the World Bank committed that 35% of its portfolio will be climate finance.

But that doesn’t mean that 35% of verbs portfolio will only help respond to the climate crisis, a lot of that money could also be helping with things like child rights, or, you know, helping communities to develop infrastructure. providing essential finance for needs that people have day to day can also have climate co benefits. So that’s why I put it put a specific number and how much climate finance is needed.

But we for sure, now, some basic principles that we need to have in mind when we move forward with financing anything. And one is we need to be as close to zero emissions as possible by 2050. And that’s net.

So that means we need to stop investing in high meaning projects no matter what they are. And that’s not just in the energy sector. It’s the transportation sector, its infrastructure, its agriculture, and so like large industrial farms are a big problem. But we didn’t do that as quickly as possible, not just by 2050.

So in terms of sequestration and carbon capture, which you said that you’re against, and believe that it’s kind of directly linked to the fossil fuel industry, isn’t it possible to have sequestration and carbon capture without it being related to the oil industry or or fossil fuels?

Yeah, it is. So I think first, the starting point I have is, what are some of the main reasons leaders are not acting more quickly, and we’ve hit on some of them in the conversation already. There’s not enough accountability. There’s perverse incentives from the global economy, namely the the need to develop as quickly as possible in ways that could be fundamentally devastating to the climate. But there’s also the moral hazard issue.

So this is the problem with CCS, the starting point with carbon capture and storage is that, yes, in theory, it could be helpful. But what we’ve seen is and I’ve lobbied in Congress for a long time now is that it’s used as a crutch, to not act now in ways that we no matter. So we know, if you want to reduce emissions from the energy sector, do you need to swap out fossil fuel source sources of energy with renewable sources of energy?

And the answer is not to start to develop some carbon capture and storage pilot projects that will maybe help 20 or 30 years down the road. Like that’s not helpful. But you don’t even have to get to that point, I think you can just look at what’s actually happening. So there’s a global CCS Institute, you can look at the projects that they’re actually that have broken ground that are moving forward.

Or you can look at what the interest is just in the US what have been the uses of the 45 Q tax credit for carbon capture. This is the largest boondoggle for the oil and gas industry ever in US history. What they’re doing is scrubbing carbon dioxide from raw gas that’s extracted because you can’t have that be in the gas before you put it into the pipes to people’s homes or to gas fired power plants.

They’re scrubbing that CO2 out, and then they’re piping it to the oil production areas that have exhausted supplies, it can’t get any more out unless they’ve pumped CO2 down in there, and they’ve run out of natural reservoirs of CO2.

So we’re essentially subsidizing anthropogenic sources of CO2 to promote more oil production, and we’re getting that CO2 CO2 from the gas extraction industry. It’s got nothing to do with reducing emissions from a coal fired power plant or from a biogas plant or any other kind of plant. It’s actually just subsidizing the oil industry. It’s not doing anything for infrastructure or for policy.

Well, that I agree with you is crazy and certainly we should limit any certainly a tax dollars going to benefit producers, oil producers from using that scam, or scheme, whatever you want to call it to to fleece the American taxpayer’s to pay for greenwashing that, but I guess I would look at it a different way in after the break, we can continue this conversation.
You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern. I’ve got Kyle Ash from the Bank Information Center. We’ll be right back in just one minute.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And I’ve got Kyle Ash with the Bank Information Center. Kyle, just talking to you about carbon sequestration and carbon capture? And what about the positive ways that carbon can be captured and possibly help us stave off, you know, essentially a disaster? T

hat’s kind of the way I look at it is that, yes, maybe sequestration is not being used its highest and best method at this point in time and in ways that you just described, but it does have the potential for being used for good. And if we are truly in facing an existential crisis, which I think we are, why not develop these carbon capture and sequestration techniques so that we can avert a complete climate disaster.

So it’s really tempting to look for quick tech solutions that would make it not so essential that we just completely overhaul our economic paradigm, I think that’s what people are looking for. And it doesn’t have to be we’re overhauling our economic paradigm. If we’re just not using fossil fuels anymore. There maybe is a way that carbon capture could be helpful.

And the only type of carbon capture and storage that I’ve come around to being open to discussing is what’s called DAX, or direct air carbon capture. And so that’s where you’re just you have machines that are sucking CO2 out of the air, the question then becomes what you do with it. And there are some ideas that you could actually do things like, use the CO2 that you’ve sucked out of the earth, these machines to as input into concrete, or other building materials.

You know, that seems fine to me, like if you’re actually able to do that at scale. And because public financing is zero sum, you’re not taking away money for projects that we know would actually have an impact and the climate crisis, I think that that would be fine. I think also, you need to make sure you’re consulting local communities.

And this is one issue with with a lot of CCS projects, generally, is that they require building a lot of infrastructure of pipelines for moving the CO2 around just as an example. And we’d seen in some of the projects that were developed over the last decade in the US in the South, as others use of eminent domain, you’re having to, you know, destroy communities to build these pipelines.

It’s not a new story. But do we really need a whole other set of infrastructure to deal with a climate crisis like this, and I think it’s questionable. So consulting local communities has to be a part of this, if we are to do it, and that’s the same for any proposed solutions, even if they’re renewables projects. There’s another type of carbon capture and storage that I think some in my guess, in my circles that are still kind of open to, which is Beck’s This is bioengineering, bio energy, carbon capture.

So this is not relying on fossil fuels. This is getting to a point where using some form some form of bio energy. So say, ideally, you’re just using leftovers from a sawmill, or something like that wood pellets to to produce electricity, and you’re capturing that CO2, or some other project like that we’re using some kind of biomass as an input. But then the question becomes, is it sustainable, not just as a good for the climate?

I mean, there’s another global crisis we have, which is extinctions. We’re in the probably second worst, at least extinction crisis that the world has ever seen. The worst one since humans have been around for sure.

And so whatever solutions we move forward, can’t have a massive impact on biodiversity either. If we’re sourcing this biomass from otherwise healthy forests, anywhere in the world, that could be a big problem. So just something to keep an eye on with the backs if any projects move forward like that.

Well, what are some of the rate main reasons that global leaders are not acting more quickly?

Well, there’s a few. And we talked about CCS. And so that is a moral hazard sort of, exacerbates any of those reasons. I would say the promise of nuclear energy is is also another one of those moral hazards we could talk about as well. But that’s just getting to, is it worth the money spent and nuclear isn’t.

But the first one I point out is that in some countries, leaders are just not accountable to the people, they govern much less the global community. So there’s still, there’s still countries whose economies are reliant on fossil fuels production and exports, that don’t have any strategy for diversifying their economies.

And I won’t name these countries, but they’re still involved in the UN climate negotiations and attempting to at least negotiate in good faith to deal with the climate crisis. But they’re depending on an industry which needs to go away. So it’s difficult to have negotiations in good faith, if those are the circumstances.

And why not? Why not name names? I mean, which which countries are we talking about?

Well, I think it’s summer in different places. And because I’m not in conversations with each of them. I will not presume that say Saudi Arabia has no behind closed doors strategy that is starting to develop to diversify its economy and no longer export oil and gas. I mean, I know that that country in particular is investing more and more in solar, we just hope that they’re not doing it only in other countries with an expectation that they will get some credit.

That cancels out the climate pollution that’s coming from burning the oil that came from under their ground. So I think it’s going to be, you know, how you get to a point where they actually are negotiating in good faith is going to be different with each country. But we do need to see a strategy that they’re actually diversifying. It’s harder if you’re talking about specific companies.

And I think why I would be slow to sit down at the negotiating table with a big company like Exxon, which has talked about diversifying its its revenue base, but hasn’t really done that. And they’re still really just looking at extreme oil extraction strategies, including carbon capture enhanced oil recovery. So but I also think that the accountability issue is not just about which countries are at the negotiating table, it’s also a sub national issue. So if you’re talking about not just carbon sources of carbon, but carbon sinks, so we need global forest protection.

And if you have countries who are not considering the needs, and impacts on indigenous peoples that live in, in these huge, intact forests, then you know that those forests are more likely going to be under threat. So if you have this approach, where you’re actually looking at the needs of people on the ground, as well as the needs of the global community, and not just about climate, you’re probably more likely going to support the movement in the right direction.

But another thing I’d point to, I think I mentioned before is this person, perverse incentives from the global economy. And this is essentially that we still have this system of economic development that is fundamentally harming the biosphere. And we’ve talked a lot about the World Bank, the World Bank, really, for years was promoting this development model. I think that they’re evolving, they’re getting a little bit better.

And one thing, one great result, I think, that came out of this recent climate conference in Egypt, was that the global community is coming around that there needs to be a new sort of economic development model. And it can’t continue to be as it has been. But let me just give you one example of a project I came across recently that is illustrating how we’re not there yet. And so the World Bank has, every year, a list of projects that they call climate finance, where there’s climate co benefits.

And it’s been really we don’t quite understand how they measure climate resilience or adaptation, is a project actually going to help communities on the ground adapt to the climate crisis. That’s the question that they have when they invest in a project. And so I, I found that I came across a project in PNG, Papua New Guinea, which is called a transport Resilience Project.

So this is a climate finance project. In the transport sector, this project, the World Bank says it’s going to be good for climate adaptation in those communities because the road that they are renovating, it’s a road that already exists. It’s basically an old decrepit dirt road, it’s going to take into account greater amounts of flooding in the future from increased rainfall from the climate crisis.

And the change to the local climate patterns in Indonesia, or in PNG. And so the metric is it will connect people along that road for a longer time. So the metric is numbers of people connected as a result of this road that’s built which will work better because it will deal with flooding better. But this is just about resilience. I mean, it’s a little bit questionable. Whether that’s a good enough metric for climate resilience, I think I would say maybe it’s not.

Because is that road just number one? Was it something that they were going to do anyway? And they just decided to make it a little bit better? Or is it being renovated because of the climate crisis? But I would put all that aside and just say, is it also good for climate pollution? Like, if you’re going to call it climate finance, it should be good for both helping the community adapt to climate.

And it shouldn’t make the climate crisis worse. But this road has been built, so that they can expand deforestation and primary forests and old growth forest in PNG, in order to raise cattle for meat, grow sugar cane, eucalyptus, and palm oil, all industries which have massive known impacts on the climate. So this overall is going to be a project which is bad for the climate crisis, from a climate pollution perspective.

And in the end, all of that is for export. So it’s still promoting this development model. In PNG, which is probably not in the end going to be that great for PNG. And it’s certainly going to be worse with the climate crisis.

Well, you’ve been listening to A Climate Change with our guest, Kyle Ash, with the Bank Information Center. Kyle, great work you’re doing over there to monitor and hold the World Bank and other multi-lateral lending agencies accountable.

And that was a great example. I mean, in in a bad way of how we have lent to countries and in ways that makes make our climate problems worse, rather than better. So hopefully, you will do great work to stop that project and redirect those funds in a in a more climate friendly manner. Thanks again for being on the show.

Thanks for having me, Matt.

Okay. Well tune in next week. Thanks for listening and you’re listening to A Climate Change.