GREENIE ATTACKS ON THE WORLD BANK

Greenies like keeping poor nations poor

"As I've discovered time and again, feisty Internet-enabled activists wage endless campaigns against the world's premier development institution, forcing it to spend an absurd amount of effort on public relations and delaying good projects that could reduce poverty.

I ran into one instance of the damage caused by such campaigns in Uganda, where the World Bank had been backing a dam to generate badly needed electricity. The project had drawn fire from Western environmental groups, notably the International Rivers Network of Berkeley. The activists argued, among other things, that the dam ignored popular opposition from the Ugandan environmental movement and that it would harm the poor farmers whose land would be flooded.

But when I checked these allegations, I found the evidence was weak. The Ugandan environmental "movement" consisted of a grouplet with only 25 members. And when I teamed up with a local sociologist to interview people around the dam site, I found that they were happy with the money they would get to compensate them for moving.

Or take an example from China. In 1999, the World Bank agreed to back a project that would move 58,000 extremely poor Chinese farmers off barren land into an area where they could grow enough to feed their families. Because the project was in a province that bordered on Tibet, Tibet activists in the West sprang into action: They claimed that the World Bank was backing Han Chinese colonization of Tibetan lands, even though no Han farmers were being imported from outside the province, and even though some of the resettled farmers were themselves Tibetan. Hollywood figures such as Richard Gere joined in the campaign, and Reps. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) beat up on the bank too. After a long, costly fight, the bank pulled out of the project.

Or take the case of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, another controversial World Bank enterprise. Western activists opposed this, partly on the reasonable ground that oil projects seldom help the poor, but also because the pipeline would supposedly disrupt the rain forest through which it traveled. At the World Bank's insistence, the pipeline consortium prepared a social and environmental impact study that ran to 19 volumes, but the activists still predicted catastrophe if construction went ahead. In this instance, the protesters were defeated and the pipeline was built - without any terrible environmental fallout. But the delays cost millions of dollars, and the bill was ultimately paid by the world's poorest people.....

The World Bank has done its utmost to fight back. Its president, James Wolfensohn, is a formidable charmer with an infectious, poverty-fighting passion; if he can't win over the bank's foes, no leader could. Which means that film stars, members of Congress and (yes) journalists must do their bit to help him out. The World Bank will remain hobbled and encircled until the rest of us begin to treat activist assertions with a dose of skepticism. Some seeming good-guy groups are less noble than they claim to be."

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GREENIES TALK AS IF MONEY WERE INFINITE

"We have limited resources and face many challenges. Here's a simple truth; the money spent to combat climate change is not available to eradicate malaria, killer of 2 million people each year, 90 percent are children under 5. And it takes money to increase female literacy in poor nations -- perhaps the key investment for social progress.

Those who believe climate change trumps all else ignore the reality that we must trade off among competing values. Those who deny this hold a religious position that is not open to reason.

What if those who question the need for dramatic action are all pawns of "corporate polluters"? Even if so (it's not), the costs of addressing climate change will be paid by real people. Does anyone honestly believe Pacific Gas and Electric deliberately emits carbon to destroy our climate? Aren't they simply responding to consumers willingness to give up something they value (i.e., money) for the energy required to run their washing machines and PCs?....

The great grandchildren of the world's poorest are those most likely to be adversely effected by global warming. Here's the key to ethical policies. The best defense against adverse consequences of warming is wealth creation in the developing world. Here's why. In this arena as in so many others, wealth buffers adversity. The greatest dangers are premature policies which stifle third world economic progress, e.g., first world trade barriers. This great truth is often ignored in the debate over climate change.

Stephen Schneider, a Stanford biologist and global warming alarmist, criticized the Copenhagen project by saying, "Climate change is not an economics problem. It's an ethics problem." Mr. Schneider, indeed it is.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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