Carbon-offset dealings by the World Bank have been criticized (and not for the first time) in a report released Thursday by the Institute for Policy Studies. In the past two years, the report charges, the bank has loaned $1.5 billion to fossil-fuel companies to make minor greenhouse-gas reductions.
It then sells carbon credits for those reductions, says coauthor Daphne Wysham, "takes its 13 percent cut, and everyone is happy." (Well, except the planet and its advocates -- the bank has come under much protest recently for funding a massive coal plant in India.) The bank would be better off getting out of the offset market and putting its funds toward renewable energy, says report coauthor Janet Redman: "This does nothing for increasing access to clean energy, the development of the low-carbon economy, or sustainable [solutions]."
