Recent content by Daphne Wysham

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Despite the clear alarm bells sounded by Fukushima and the BP Gulf oilspill, Obama has yet to change either his energy policies or strategy.

Energy and Climate Change: C+

In his first few months in office, Obama did take some significant actions to address climate change, but failed to follow through.

The World Bank takes the money and runs from Chad

After years of criticism and growing proof of high-level corruption, the World Bank has finally pulled out of a “model” pipeline project. Will the Bank finally learn its lesson and change its behaviour?

Now that the World Bank has announced its withdrawal of support for the $4.2 billion Chad-Cameroon pipeline, I can't help but remember the eyes of that boy. We were racing back from the Doba oil fields to the Chadian capitol city of N'Djamena in July 2006, traveling by van after dark.

Why Carbon Offsets Backfire

With a city motto of "Exclusively Industrial," the town of Vernon was already a pollution magnet. Then offsets made it worse, writes Daphne Wysham

you don't have to leave the United States for an object lesson in how an emissions offset system can go wrong.

The Waste-Pickers of Delhi

The original Delhi recyclers have turned garbage into cash for decades. Now, a carbon-credit-generating incinerator may put them out of business, writes Daphne Wysham

India's waste-pickers—often women and children—join free-ranging cows and other less sacred animals in a daily forage through the garbage of the streets. They've been recycling trash for decades, since long before recycling became fashionable in the West, and in Delhi, a 13-million-person metropolis, the waste-pickers number in the tens of thousands.

Beyond Bretton Woods

A series of provocative essays by leading researchers and activists on three crucial questions: what kind of development should new global economic institutions promote, what are the viable alternatives to the World Bank and IMF and what other global economic institutions are needed to promote a more just trading order with greater social and ecological responsibility.

World Bank Climate Profiteering

The World Bank's long-running identity crisis is proving hard to shake. When efforts to rebrand itself as a "knowledge bank" didn't work, it devised a new identity as a "Green Bank." Really? Yes, it's true.

Sure, the Bank continues to finance fossil fuel projects globally, but never mind. The World Bank has seized upon the immense challenges climate change poses to humanity and is now front and center in the complicated, international world of carbon finance. It can turn the dirtiest carbon credits into gold.

How exactly, does this work, you ask?

Note from Bali: Please Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

It's day four of the UN Climate Convention and the air is heavy with humidity. Even the rooms in the conference facilities where people are clustered around computers seem like saunas, an appropriate thing, I suppose---reminding us not only of where we are, in tropical Bali, but also of why we're here. The world has a fever, and we're here to begin to bring the temperature down, before it's too late.

Hoodwinked in Bali on Carbon Credits

"Carbon Trading: Practical Solution to Global Warming or Corporate Greenwash?" A Debate

Blood Money: U.S. Bank Funds Korean Project That Will Destroy Native Community

World Bank OK With Blood For Oil

A Planet For Some Carbon?

Talking points on Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, and climate change

Enron's Final, Biggest Error

Commentary, Special to The Plain Dealer

The Aftermath of Kyoto

Chronology of Enron's Empire

Commentary on Niger Delta's Women Protest

Profiting from Pollution