The Climate Agenda’s March Through the Institutions: Can It Be Stopped?

By Tilak K. Doshi

A spate of stories in the media recently provides a remarkable illustration of how the globalist policy agenda of the climate industrial complex has captured key international institutions and perverted their original organizational aims. From initially serving broad, laudable objectives for the welfare of their constituents, these institutions have been subverted over the years to serve the insistent pseudoscientific claims of climate alarmists.

The corruption of global institutions has, in turn, led to significant opposition that is becoming apparent. There is the prospect of an incoming Trump administration that is avowedly sceptical of the claims of an alleged climate crisis and is intent on exiting the UN’s Paris Agreement and its “net zero by 2050” policy target for a second time. This presents a welcome challenge to these corrupt institutions. Will President Trump and some of the populist parties in Europe be capable of countering the entrenched globalist climate agenda?

The World Bank

On 17^th October, Oxfam published a report that shockingly found that up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance —nearly 40% of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years— is “unaccounted for between the time projects were approved and when they closed.” In other words, no one knows how the money was used. There is no paper trail revealing where the money went or what the accomplished results were.

Green cronyism, ranging from the Solyndra debacle – the waste of almost half a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money on a failed solar farm project under President Obama’s watch — to President Biden’s duplicitously-named Inflation Reduction Act which will unleash an estimated $1 trillion deluge of subsidies on favored “green” industries is nothing new. But it is instructive to trace the World Bank’s decline from its honorable founding objectives to its current status as yet another institution advocating green causes.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, reflecting the progressive virtues of President Obama who appointed him as president of the World Bank in 2012, imposed a ban on the financing of coal-fired power stations in 2013. This was followed by a ban on investments in all new upstream oil and gas resource development projects. The distinguished economist Deepak Lal,  a former Research Administrator of the Bank, remarked that Dr. Kim incredulously “over-ruled the cost-benefit estimates of coal-based power over solar and wind-based power generation produced by his own economic staff, justifying this by reference to a wish to cut global emissions of greenhouse gases.”

The World Bank’s objections to the use of fossil fuels despite their importance to economic growth and poverty alleviation – which constitute its foundational institutional objectives — can be traced to the intellectual evolution of its management under James Wolfensohn during his decade as president (1995 – 2005). Mr. Wolfensohn traced the arc from the old regime to the new. The old was represented by the “Washington consensus” of free markets, liberal trading regimes, sound money and entrepreneurship associated with the classical liberalism of Adam Smith.

The new intellectual environment of the World Bank’s management – personified by Joseph Stiglitz, Chief Economist of the World Bank (1997 – 2000) — was defined by the theoretical failures of the free market, especially in accounting for the alleged negative climate impacts of fossil fuel use. Stiglitz, a climate alarmist, wrote in a 2015 court brief for a failed climate lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of children against the US Federal government that “fossil fuel-based economies imposed ‘incalculable’ costs on society and shifting to clean energy will pay off.”

Rupert Darwall, a former adviser to the United Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and author of Green Tyranny, encapsulates the betrayal of the World Bank to its founding objectives as follows:

The World Bank’s mission has been subverted by green ideologues who assert that a low-carbon world benefits the world’s poor but fail to acknowledge that making energy much more costly increases poverty. The World Bank tags itself as ‘working for a world free of poverty’…In making its choice between development and sustainability, the World Bank has decided it is going to try and ‘save the planet’ on the backs of the poor.

By abdicating its founding principles for alleviating global poverty, the World Bank has taken a lead role among multilateral financial institutions in denying vast financial resources to poorer countries. It has hypocritically vetoed the right of developing countries to adopt the path of economic growth and environmental improvement that the now-rich countries had taken up successfully since the industrial revolution two centuries ago. The Bank’s obsessive support for intermittent, low-yield renewable energy such as solar and wind power comes at the cost of its central charter to help the poor, an outcome that can only be described as egregiously unjust.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The UN IPCC issued a news release on December 6^th prior to the start of a “scoping” meeting in Kuala Lumpur of over 230 experts from 70 countries to draft outlines of working group contributions to the UN IPCC’s 7^th Assessment Report (to be completed in 2029). In the press release, the IPCC claimed that human combustion of fossil fuels “has resulted in more frequent and more intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world.” This is contrary to the IPCC’s position hitherto, which is that almost all types of extreme weather events cannot be attributed with confidence to human activity. 

The position of the IPCC regarding the lack of any link between climate change and extreme weather events is contrary to the almost daily headlines in the mainstream media attributing specific adverse weather events to “climate change.”  The work of eminent climate policy analysts  Steve Koonin and Roger Pielke Jr. has done much to expose the pseudoscientific nature of what has been called “attribution studies.” These typically involve researchers who apply their climate models and historical observations to conclude that any particular weather event (say a hurricane or a drought) was made “more likely” or “more severe” by some magnitude in percentage units due to “human influence” (referring to the combustion of fossil fuels).

Based on the dubious claims of “attribution science,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a climate law last week that will require companies operating in New York state responsible for large amounts of planet-warming pollution to contribute to climate damage repair efforts. Under the new state law, companies responsible for the bulk of emissions from 2000 to 2018 will be on the hook for some $3 billion a year over the next 25 years.

Steve Koonin cites the World Meteorological Organization that states that “any single event, such as tropical cyclone cannot be attributed to human-induced climate change, given the state of scientific understanding.” The IPCC’s “Special Report on Extreme Events” states that “Many weather and climate extremes are the result of natural climate variability…Even if there were no anthropogenic changes in climate, a wide variety of natural weather and climate extremes would still occur.”

Nonetheless, international organizations such as the World Bank and the IPCC have been increasingly politicized to serve climate hysteria. In this context, Chris Morrison of The Daily Sceptic finds that “[f]ears are growing that the IPCC could water down or even ditch its current finding that almost all types of extreme weather events have little or no sign of past human involvement, or any going forward to 2100.”

International Energy Agency

On December 23^rd, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, released a report documenting how the International Energy Agency “has moved away from its energy security mission to become an “energy transition” cheerleader.” The report finds that the “French President Macron’s observation that IEA has become the ‘armed wing for implementing the Paris Agreement’ is regrettably true. With the many serious energy security challenges facing the world, however, IEA should not be a partisan cheerleader. What the world needs from IEA—and what it is not receiving now—is sober and unbiased analyses and projections that educate and inform policymakers and investors. IEA needs to remember why it was established and return to its energy security mission.”

The divergence of the IEA away from its original mission to advise policymakers in its member countries with sound analysis of trends in global energy supply and demand to becoming a “cheerleader” for radical net zero emission policy targets has not gone unnoticed over recent years. I have written on the ideological approach adopted by the IEA in its advocacy for green causes here, here, and here.

When the organization issued a call for the cessation of all future investments in developing fossil fuel resources in May 2021, this is what I wrote:

It is a month since the International Energy Agency – the rich world’s energy advisory body established in the wake of the oil price shock of 1973 — issued its astonishing report calling for the end to all new investments in oil and gas (let alone coal) from 2021. As expected, the IEA “road-map” elicited widespread media coverage and strong reactions, ranging from gushing support from those convinced of a “climate emergency” to outright dismissal, as in the case of the Saudi oil minister who called the report a sequel to “La La Land.” 

When ideological advocacy becomes the measure of achievement for the IEA, the loss of credibility and soundness of its policy advice is only to be expected.  The IEA’s messianic fervour for green technologies such as solar and wind power, “green” hydrogen, batteries and electric vehicles prevents it from asking basic questions. If it is true that drastically cutting back on fossil fuels is consistent with higher economic growth and increased productive employment, why does the IEA recommend policymakers to force countries along “net-zero” pathways? Surely, if replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar energy and electric vehicles promote growth and employment, then wouldn’t countries such as China and India naturally race towards this best of all possible worlds without expensive green subsidies and punitive anti-fossil fuel policies?

The Trumpian Revolution Looms

Non-profit organizations reflect the needs of their funding members, and organizations such as the World Bank, IPCC and IEA are no different. As their funding is primarily from the US and EU, it is not surprising that they manifest the “climate emergency” predilections of the Biden administration and the largely left-socialist West European governments which see climate change as an existential threat and a national security priority. In taking up the mantle of green advocacy on behalf of their paymasters, these organizations have lost all credibility as independent and objective advisors for their member countries.

The climate industrial complex fears the prospect of the Trump administration’s pullout of the Paris agreement for the second time. Politico, a reliable mouthpiece for the climate establishment, expressed these fears soon after Mr. Trump’s election victory: “The world is bracing for President-elect Donald Trump to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the second time — only this time, he could move faster and with less restraint.” In Europe, the emergence of populist parties  have been partly propelled by the widespread rejection by EU citizens of the onerous fiscal burdens imposed by green policies. 

The seismic change in policy direction that a second term “drill, baby, drill” Trump administration promises for the global climate juggernaut – represented by the three leading international agencies covered here – can only be seen as hopeful as we look forward to positive developments in energy policy in 2025.

Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes and a member of the C0₂ Coalition. Follow him on Substack and X.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.