April 2011
Despite the clear alarm bells sounded by Fukushima and the BP Gulf oilspill, Obama has yet to change either his energy policies or strategy.
January 2010
In his first few months in office, Obama did take some significant actions to address climate change, but failed to follow through.
September 2008
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.
August 2008
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.
August 2008
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.
July 2008
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.
April 2008
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?
January 2008
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.