Addressing Climate Change at the World Bank

"Marshall Jevons" has been watching the telly, and saw Sebastian Mallaby telling Fareed Zakaria what Robert Zoellick should be doing at the World Bank. He thinks Mallaby's on the right track (see from about 7:10 onwards):

One of the big, big challenges and opportunities for the World Bank, I think, is climate change. Because the world has got to a point where it sees there is a problem: something has to be done. At the same time, a second Kyoto kind of deal is extraordinarily unlikely and, if you had it, it would not bring in China and India, which are two of the big sources of carbon emissions now. And so you need to have something which is global, because it's a global problem, but which is short of a kind of huge great treaty. And I think brokering action through the World Bank, using the World Bank as a convener of countries from around the world, which has the technical expertise to do projects, which knows how to manage large sums of money, that is something where the World Bank can make a big difference.

Mallaby and Zakaria together then cook up a scheme whereby the G7 will give the World Bank some gazillions of dollars to bribe the Chinese and Indians into burning clean coal. (They never mention the word "sequestration", which is disappointing, since even "clean" coal emits enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, and the World Bank might be very well placed to encourage China and India to capture and store their carbon emissions underground.)

I'm not convinced that this kind of mission creep is necessarily a good idea for the Bank: it feels like a desperate casting-around for Something To Do in a context of increasing irrelevancy for the World Bank. In any case, the idea that the G7 is suddenly going to find vast amounts of money to simply give to India and China is, shall we say, even less likely than a second Kyoto treaty. If Zoellick is going to make his mark on the Bank, I think he might be well advised to continue to look at development issues and global poverty reduction, rather than disappearing off on a climate-change tangent, important though the climate-change issue is.