The World Bank was created, in part, to help alleviate the extreme poverty in about 10% of the world's population. That's 700 million people living on less than $2 a day.
The bank gets its funding from contributions made by rich nations. However, a recent decision to divert 45% of its development funds from poverty programs to climate change programs is meant more to assuage the guilt of rich nations than to help the poor climb out of poverty.
About $40 billion a year from the World Bank is now earmarked to fund climate change mitigation efforts. Naturally, with that much loose cash floating around, sticky fingers are busy "misplacing" the money, and isn't that a darn shame?
An investigation by Oxfam of the World Bank's finances shows that anywhere between $24 and $41 billion of "misplaced funds" has gone missing due to "poor record-keeping practices, says Oxfam.
And yes, these funds were likely stolen.
An Oxfam audit of the World Bank’s 2017-2023 climate finance portfolio found that between $24 billion and $41 billion in climate finance went unaccounted for between the time projects were approved and when they closed.
There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible. It also remains unclear whether these funds were even spent on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy.
“The Bank is quick to brag about its climate finance billions —but these numbers are based on what it plans to spend, not on what it actually spends once a project gets rolling,” said Kate Donald, Head of Oxfam International’s Washington, D.C., Office. "This is like asking your doctor to assess your diet only by looking at your grocery list, without ever checking what actually ends up in your fridge.”
"There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used"? This is truly major-league grifting. The World Bank bureaucrats should get some kind of award for this.
As the song says, "You Ain't Seen Nothing' Yet." Next year, climate bureaucrats, celebrities, world leaders, and poorer nations will all descend on that destination vacation spot, Azerbaijan, to negotiate a new global climate finance goal, the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG).
The poorer nations are going to demand $5 trillion every year in public funds to the Global South "as a down payment towards their climate debt" to the countries, people, and communities most affected by climate change.
"Climate debt"? What a racket.
“Climate finance is scarce, and yes, we know it’s hard to deliver. But not tracking how or where the money actually gets spent? That’s not just some bureaucratic oversight — it’s a fundamental breach of trust that risks derailing the progress we need to make at COP this year. The Bank needs to act like our future depends on tackling the climate crisis, because it does,” said Donald.
Whether the future depends on the climate fund is not the question. It's if the World Bank can be trusted to divvy up $5 trillion over the next decade to kleptocrats in the Third World and how much in kickbacks they're going to expect.
International organizations are stocked to the gills with people who invent new ways to enrich themselves. Until we pull the plug on their gravy train from the West, they will continue to rob us blind.
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