How WB keeps many poor nations poor

What is the point of the World Bank? You probably think of it, if at all, as a benign institution, a kind of giant, multilateral aid agency, whose job it is to bring liquidity to developing nations and help them grow out of poverty.

Until not so long ago, that was indeed its function. Created alongside the International Monetary Fund, the bank did sterling work in its early years helping countries like France recover from the war; and later, giving mostly third world countries the vital seed money needed to help attract investors to risky capital projects. Its multiplier effect on investment can be extraordinary. In 2013, the World Bank gave Kosovo $40 million towards building a lignite power station. This sent out the positive signal needed to encourage the private sector to complete the funding with another $1,960 million.

Amazing. Except that’s not what the World Bank does now. It won’t fund any more coal-fired power stations because they are not clean and green. Instead, it wants developing nations to embrace intermittent, unreliable and wildly expensive renewables like wind and solar as part of a mission to “defeat poverty and save the planet”. In fact, it will achieve neither of those goals. Take Nigeria, whose capital Lagos has overtaken Cairo as Africa’s largest city, but whose electrical grid produces so little power that the economy runs mostly on private (and filthy, polluting) diesel generators. Nigeria’s National Electric Power Authority is known as “Never Expect Power Always, Please Light a Candle”.

Blackouts and brownouts are common, as they are throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and the costs to the economy are enormous.

Here is Nigeria’s minister of finance, Kemi Adeosun: “We want to build a coal power plant because we are a country blessed with coal, yet we have a power problem. So it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it will make sense to build a coal power plant. However, we are being blocked because it is not green. This is not fair, because they have an entire Western industrialisation that was built on coalfired energy.”

She’s dead right it’s not fair. The UN is forever banging on about global injustice and admits that wealth redistribution is among its sustainable development goals. Yet at the same time, its policy of ecoimperialism forces renewables on a reluctant but largely helpless developing world — the surest way of guaranteeing that the world’s poorest nations stay that way.

There are 1.2 billion people without access to electricity and 2.7 billion without modern cooking facilities. Household air pollution from solid fuels is estimated to have killed 3.5 million people in 2010. The cost of blackouts and brownouts in sub-Saharan Africa is, in some cases, in excess of five per cent of GDP. Unlike developed nations, these countries do not need their consciences salved by bat-chomping birdslicing eco-crucifixes. They need energy that works.

According to the UN’s figures, the cost of universal energy access is just $50 billion a year. But that’s if it comes from fossil fuel. If you insist on using renewables, the bill is at least 10 times greater.

How did this madness happen? It began in 1995 when an Australian-American lawyer and investment banker called James Wolfensohn was appointed as the World Bank’s president. This archglobalist was a protégé of arguably the most sinister and influential figure in the history of the green movement, the late Canadian billionaire Maurice Strong.

Strong, who was very close to Mao’s Chinese Communist regime, was not a fan of democracy. That’s why he spent much of his career working through the UN, which he recognised as the ideal institution for creating a kind of one-world government run by enlightened technocrats like himself.

Under Wolfensohn’s diretion, the World Bank’s goals changed dramatically. Where before it had been all about alleviating poverty by encouraging efficient growth, now it was about more nebulous “progressive” goals like supporting the environment, women’s rights, labour rights and the encouragement of NGOs.

There is no economic case for pushing “high-cost, operationally defective technologies on to nations where they will retard development and make electrification vastly more expensive”. By arrangement with the Spectator