Does the end justify the means?
It is indeed praiseworthy to promote renewable energy and arrest global warming by stopping funds into coal and oil projects in developing countries. But when it drastically curtails developing countries' growth options, the measure exposes, instead, the double standards of industrialised nations.
While industrialised nations such as the US contribute the most to global warming and unilaterally abandon an international climate change treaty, northern civil society has been asking international financial institutions to divert funds to renewable energy projects instead of fossil fuel projects. These are blatantly unfair. Can Maldives or Bangladesh impose similar conditions on the US, whose actions, or lack of it, threaten to submerge the country due to sea-level rise? However, this simple fact has not deterred northern NGOs from spearheading a campaign against fossil fuel funding since the late 1990s.
A review launched by the World Bank Group
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