Foreign Policy In Focus

All at once, human-rights crises in Libya, Bahrain and Syria have brought into focus the world's inability to arrive at a consensus on a course of action. In fact, they cry out for an authority higher than states, not to mention the United Nations, to adjudicate them and prescribe a course of unified action.

To at least as great an extent this is also true of environmental crises. As Al Gore writes in Rolling Stone:

All over the world, the grassroots movement in favor of changing public policies to confront the climate crisis and build a more prosperous, sustainable future is growing rapidly. But most governments remain paralyzed, unable to take action — even after [among other things, a] seemingly endless stream of unprecedented and lethal weather disasters.

The seas, especially, at the mercy of both climate change and foreign policy, embody the need for action by a higher authority than sovereign states. Regarding climate change, by now you may have read of a report, writes the Independent, by "a panel of leading marine scientists brought together in Oxford earlier this year by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)."

The seas are degenerating far faster than anyone has predicted, the report says, because of the cumulative impact of a number of severe individual stresses, ranging from climate warming and sea-water acidification, to widespread chemical pollution and gross overfishing. . . . The report says: "Increasing hypoxia [low oxygen levels] and anoxia [absence of oxygen, known as ocean dead zones], combined with warming of the ocean and acidification, are the three factors which have been present in every mass extinction event in Earth's history."

Those include such earth-shaking events as the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction 65.5 million years ago, the Triassic–Jurassic extinction 205 million years ago, and the Permian–Triassic extinction 251 million years ago. Sobering, to say the least, to our current crisis compared to those.

Regarding foreign policy and the high seas, does anything spell global apathy, impotence, and inertia as precisely as the return -- with a vengeance -- of pirating, a scourge we thought that, except for outliers, had gone the way of small pox? The ransoms demanded today -- and paid -- beggar credulity. At Moon of Alabama, Bernhard reports on a recent case, the seizure of the MV Suez, which exemplifies in a nutshell the inability or lack of will on the part of states to deal with an international crisis.

The MV Suez was captured by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden on August 2 2010. It was freed a week ago after a quite dramatic story. . . . As month after month went by the cases of the MV Suez sailors and their families grew -- via the local media -- into interior political issues in India as well as in Pakistan. The Indian government tried to apply pressure on the owner via the Egyptian government. . . . But the Indian government . . . showed no urgency to solve the problem. . . . Late in February the Pakistani human rights advocate Ansar Barney made phone contact with the pirates and started his own negotiations. . . . When the ransom deadline had passed without the ship owner paying, [the] Ansar Barney Welfare Trust, a humanitarian NGO, started to collect the demanded $1.1 million to free the sailors. . . . Somewhere along the Egyptian owners of the ship became furious about the court cases by the families of the Egyptian crew members on board of the MV Suez. The owners backtracked on a promise to pay some share of the ransom they had earlier agreed to [which subsequently] increased to $2.1 million.

One World Government: The Most Loaded Phrase on Earth

No matter how utopian sounding to some or dystopian to others, who fear the United States surrendering its sovereignty to George Soros and the Bilderbergers, none of these issues -- from humanitarian intervention to saving the seas -- may truly be resolved until or unless states finally reconcile themselves to world government.

True, serious consideration may yet take two or three generations -- and an exponential increase in the degradation of the quality of life on earth. But a model exists. In an April post spurred by the Libyan intervention, I wrote that, in a 2008 column for the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman acknowledged that world government represents "the kind of ideas that get people reaching for their rifles in America's talk-radio heartland." But, he wrote of the European Union:

So could the European model go global? . . . a change in the political atmosphere suggests that "global governance" could come much sooner than that. The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty.

Once states see the benefits that other states that have cast their lot together are reaping, state sovereignty suddenly loses its luster. Ian Williams explains in a 2009 World Policy Journal article.

Ironically, Albanians, Kosovars, and Serbs -- along with all their neighbors in the Balkan cockpit of nationalities -- unite in sharing the same overriding ambition. They all desperately want to join the European Union, which would entail them giving up much of the sovereignty that they have been so zealously squabbling over. . . . European Union citizens can live and work anywhere they want within the EU, claim education, healthcare, and welfare benefits -- and even vote in many elections. For all those nations, whose working definition of sovereignty seems to include the right, indeed the duty, to harass foreigners at the borders and inside them, this is serious self-denial in the interest of a broader human or economic security.

True, job openings for those who seek to rule countries may become scarce. But it's a small price to pay to ensure the continuation of life on earth.

We're honored to have Michael Busch dissecting the latest WikiLeaks document dump for Focal Points. This is the fifty-third in the series.

Recent cables published by WikiLeaks from the American embassy in Ottawa paint a less than flattering picture of Stephen Harper. The Canadian prime minister, whose Conservative Party took a commanding majority in nationwide elections last week, has built his political success on a platform of aggressive nationalism concerning the country’s Arctic sovereignty, pro-business economics, and keen avoidance of doing anything about climate change.

But from the perspective of American diplomats, Harper has a decidedly different list of priorities he pursues in private.  In a cable that dates to January 2010, US Ambassador to Canada David Jacobson outlines what he sees as prime minister’s top five policy objectives.

Not surprisingly, “Harper’s top goal for 2010 is remaining in power,” which Jacobson notes will force the country’s conservatives “to claim credit even when it is not due to them.” While Harper has enjoyed unrivalled personal popularity throughout Canada, his party was not as warmly embraced. “Harper failed to convince the public to give them a majority” in successive federal elections during 2004, 2006, and 2008, though Jacobson notes that a new round of elections in 2010 might prove beneficial to the party.

Conservatives arguably have the most to gain in a new election, given the many self-inflected wounds suffered by the Liberals under [Michael] Ignatieff over the past year. The Conservatives nonetheless do not wish the public to blame them for a new and still unwelcome election.

In fact, it’s not clear if Harper’s Conservatives have much going for them beyond Ignatieff’s incompetence to effectively organize a viable opposition. 

Liberal disarray and disappointing fundraising in the second half of 2009 leave the Liberal party in poor shape to face an election, which Ignatieff now admits that the public does not want. Nor have the Liberals hit upon a potentially winning issue. They and the NDP have tried to turn the treatment of Afghan detainees transferred by the Canadian Forces to Afghan authorties in 2006 and 2007 into a major embarrassment for the government. So far, the public isn’t biting (51 percent remain unaware of the issue…), and it is far from clear that there is much political utility for any of the opposition parties in making a major push to continue this probe.

According to the cable, Harper’s second priority, after preserving his own employment, is to “re-grow the economy.” While the prime minister and his associates have taken the lion’s share of credit for helping steer the ship of state through the turbulent economic waters of the 2008 financial and economic crisis, the US embassy in Ottawa wasn’t so sure these claims were the entirely accurate. “The jury is still somewhat out on whether long-standing monetary and fiscal policies were the main factors,” the cable notes, “or whether Canada’s huge resource base and openness to international trade were not at least as much factors.” It didn’t matter, though because “the Conservatives have in any event pretty much succeeded in convincing the public that they are more trustworthy on this issue than the Liberal would be.” Still, “The Conservatives do not appear to have any bold measures up their sleeves to improve the economy, but appear content to wait for…a rising global economy—especially the US—to life all boats.”

Harper and his gang might have been waiting to ride the coattails of an American recovery, but it’s clear that the Canadian prime minister didn’t like Washington’s methods for stimulating the economy. From the embassy’s perspective, Harper had developed something of an obsession with what it considered his third priority: overturning provisions in the American Reconstruction and Recovery Act. Harper had addressed this issue “so often with President Obama that it has become somewhat of a private joke.”

While American protectionism was centrally important to the Harper government and his big business allies, it wasn’t clear to Jacobson than the topic was all that important to anyone else, or that any success on this front would be of much political utility. “The public—but not the business community—has largely lost track of the dispute…so even a failure in the talks might hurt Conservatives less than would been likely only a few months ago.  None of the opposition parties has any better plan on how to reverse any US inclinations.”

The cable paints Harper as particularly dismal on environmental politics, a topic the American embassy considered important to the prime minister’s future success despite his personal disinterest. The document points out that Harper agreed to attend the historic 2009 multilateral negotiations in Denmark to stem the worst effects of environmental degradation. 

Harper somewhat grudgingly went to Copenhagen for the UN summit on climate change, but only after President Obama announced that he would attend. PM Harper’s participation was virtually invisible to the Canadian public, and there was considerable negative coverage of his failure to play a more prominent role—or even to sit in on the President’s key meetings with world leaders. 

Jacobson correctly suggests that Harper’s lackluster performance at Copenhagen left his government in the unenviable position of looking at once detached from what many consider the most important international security issue facing mankind, and a lap dog to American power.

Environmental Minister Jim Prentice was sent out to do the media scrums and to insist that Canada was a helpful participant and would work closely with the United States on a continental strategy on climate change. Now he must come up with some proposals that make Canada not seem merely to be going slavishly along with whatever its American “big brother” decides to do—which will not be easy.

Making matters worse,

A substantial proportion of the Canadian public and industry…are opposed to Harper taking a leading role and are even opposed to him following any likely leads set by the Obama administration. In that respect, given Canada’s role as a major petroleum and natural gas producer, he will have an even more difficult political balancing act that will the United States or the Europeans. 

But once again, the Conservatives would be bailed out, Jacobson predicts, not by their own creative thinking or popularity, but by the opposition’s incompetence. “No big, sexy initiatives are likely from the Conservatives…Luckily for the government, the Liberals also do not have any great ideas up their sleeves.”

Most interestingly, given the election results of last week, the cable notes that “getting out of Afghanistan as gracefully as possible” would be Harper’s fifth and final major priority over the coming year. Despite his original gung-ho support for NATO operations in Afghanistan, Harper more lately repeatedly insisted that Canada would begin withdrawing its presence in the country by the end of 2011.

Diminishing public support for the mission, a sense that Canada had dones more than its share, and unspoken relief that the US surge will let Canada off the hook all argue against any Canadian political leader rethinking Canada’s strategy, at least for now. Absent a federal election in which the Conservatives win an actual majority…the likelihood at present is that Canada will withdraw on schedule, as gracefully as possible. 

Harper changed his message while campaigning in April, announcing that “I have never said there’s no risks in Afghanistan,” defending his decision, without consulting the parliament, to extend the country’s commitment in Central Asia by three years. The plan would leave roughly 950 of the 2,500 troops currently in the country behind to train Afghan and military personnel. With a new majority, however, we may expect to see other tweaking of previous Harper promises with regards to the Afghan state-building project.  

(Pictured: Saudia Arabia's King Abdullah with President Obama.)

Apparently, King Abdullah of the House of Saud (the man with the unseemly title “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”) got his feelings hurt that America objected when the totalitarian theocracy whose despot he is sent troops into a neighboring country to massacre peacefully protesting civilians. That the United States did indeed object to the deployment is news to those of us who had read the New York Times’ report that “the United States did not object to the deployment.”

Even a protestation so paltry that it escaped the Times’ notice was enough to get Abdullah’s knickers in a twist, and so it was that Defense Secretary Robert Gates made the trip all the way to Riyadh to grovel and make propitiations. It seems the Gates-Abdullah tête-à-tête sufficed where our recent $60 billion arms sale to the Saudis did not, Sec. Gates assessing that US-Saudi relations are now “in a good place.”

Perhaps, thanks to Gates’s efforts, Michelle Obama needn’t fear the withholding of gifts from Abdullah, who once lavished her with a ruby-and-diamond set valued at $132,000, or what the Saudi royals call “chump change.” Forbes on Abdullah:

“Ascended to the throne August 2005; soon after, construction began on a $26 billion city named in his honor, which the government hopes will become the new economic epicenter of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is now earning approximately $1 billion a day from oil exports, helping boost the royal family's fortune. The king is an avid horseman and breeds Arabian horses; he founded the Equestrian Club in Riyadh.”

I propose that Gates’s approach is exactly wrong, and the time is now right to abandon the Saudis. The reasons are several.

Human Rights

Women who allow themselves to be seen in society without proper hijab violate God’s law, which is the law that governs Saudi Arabia. The only way for the offending parties to make amends is by surrendering their lives, often to hurled stones. However, if a woman is a virgin, stoning her to death itself violates God’s law, which consideration necessitates raping her first, in order to please God and the Saudi judges who interpret and affirm his proclamations, peace be upon them. Of course, rape of a woman by a man other than her designated guardian – that is, her husband or father – constitutes adultery, which alone is a crime demanding execution (of the woman, not the rapist).

I need hardly detail more thoroughly the perils of living in a theocracy, whose laws are derived not from a secular constitution that includes affirmative rights for citizens but rather from a medieval collection of desert superstition and mythology. Suffice it to say Saudi Arabia’s punishments for hudud crimes are harsh enough most closely to resemble the worst abuses of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Homosexuality warrants death, apostasy warrants death, etc.

This is of course in addition to what it does via its proxy state, Bahrain, which

The Independent recently revealed has been rounding up and disappearing doctors who have attended to pro-democracy protestors there who have been injured by Bahraini and Saudi authoritarian violence.

The United States is fond of claiming for itself that, as a matter of policy, it stands with the democratic aspirations of all oppressed peoples and in opposition to tyranny and repression. Lest it seem a naive contention, I submit that it is in principle worth America’s approximating that policy with its behavior in the world. Whatever the potential benefits and drawbacks of refusing friendship to murderous, ideological autocrats, it is a good thing to do. And it is a contemptible foreign policy, indeed, that is not concerned with doing good things.

I am well aware, though, that the people who congratulate themselves with the description “foreign policy realists” are un-persuaded by such arguments, so I’d like to address my remaining contentions in their language.

Terrorism

Many is the foreign policy realist who will espouse a position that goes something like this: “On the balance, it would be preferable for the United States to support only democracies, but the threats of terror facing America are so great that she is justified in bolstering the position of dictatorships that will ally with her in the Global War on Terror.”

This is based on a flawed calculus that too heavily favors regime stability. Even if 2011 hadn’t shown dictatorship to be the least stable form of government, it is not at all clear that it is instability that is responsible for the creation of terrorists. After all, readers may recall that the majority of the men who reduced that World Trade Center to detritus were Saudi, having grown up under the self-same stable regime that rules their country today. Rather, the primary circumstances to which the spread of a violent religious ideology is attributable are mistrust in the institutions of government, the infantilization of a population placed under compulsory guardianship, an evisceration of vital civic institutions (universities, advocacy groups, internationally cooperative organizations) and, of course, the espousal of violent religious orthodoxy.

That Saudi Arabia has hosted American troops since the first Gulf War makes it both an ideal base of US military operations on the peninsula and a major target of Al Qaeda hostility. All the same, though, its activities encourage just the type of jihadism advanced by Osama bin Laden and his fellow Qtubists. Indeed, not only is Saudi Arabia the world’s chief state perpetuator of Wahabbist and Salafist ideologies; it is guilty of financing the Yemeni madrassas where Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula officials Naser al-Wahishi and Qasim al-Raymi got their initial training before going to Afghanistan to fight. This was part of the same coordinated US/Saudi/Israeli/Pakistani effort to strangle the life out of socialist pan-Arabism (Southern Yemeni socialists demanded the closure of those madrassas during the 1994 war) that brought about the regrettable emergence of the Taliban, not to mention Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran’s other proxy parties.

Ironic, that, insofar as King Abdullah is one of the world’s leading cheerleaders for violent regime change in Iran, cables released by WikiLeaks revealing that he advised the US to “cut off the head of the snake” with regard to his neighbor across the gulf. Of course, that position allies him to American neo-conservatives but is motivated not by anti-totalitarianism or by a regard for international comity as much as by racism.

According to the cable, the king told the Americans what he had just told the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki. "You as Persians have no business meddling in Arab matters," the Saudi monarch was quoted as telling Mottaki. "Iran's goal is to cause problems," he told Brennan. "There is no doubt something unstable about them."

Adbullah is too shrewd and concerned with self-preservation, though, to discharge this sort of bigotry publicly. Instead, he puts on a much kinder face in his official capacity, ending, for example, a letter to President Bush (PDF) on the occasion of the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks thus:

I would like to say to you, my dear friend, that God Almighty, in His wisdom, tests the faithful by allowing such calamities to happen. But He, in His mercy, also provides us with the will and determination, generated by faith, to enable us to transform such tragedies into great achievements, and crises that seem debilitating are transformed into opportunities for the advancement of humanity. I only hope that, with your cooperation and leadership, a new world will emerge out of the rubble of the World Trade Center: a world that is blessed by the virtues of freedom, peace, prosperity and harmony.”

One wants to ask the signatories of the “Saudi Women Revolution Statement” how lavishly Abdullah’s commitment to “freedom, peace, prosperity and harmony” has benefited them.

Diplomatic capital

It is customary for the Saudis’ media output to be as reassuring as that, including on their decision to grant asylum to deposed Tunisian dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.

Saudi Arabia announced Wednesday that it would not allow deposed Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali to engage in any political activity from the Kingdom. “This act (of sheltering) should not lead to any kind of activity in Tunisia from the Kingdom ... There are conditions, and no act in this regard will be allowed,” Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said in an interview with Saudi Television.

This is illustrative, though, because Saudi Arabia is everywhere the enemy of the Middle Eastern onzards or what is conventionally called the “Arab Spring,” this to exclude the case of Iran, of course. The House of Saud justly sees its own downfall prognosticated in the writing on the walls of its regional neighbors. As corrupt, brutal regimes that enrich themselves by exploiting citizenry falter and topple all around them, the Saudi royals have no priority higher than reversing the course of 2011’s geopolitical direction.

Saudi Arabia’s client despot to the South, Yemen’s embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh, has promised to resign in a month (Jeremy Scahill: “I'll believe Saleh is stepping down from power when he is no longer president.”), leaving the government to his deputy – some regime change. This move retains the endorsement of the Obama foreign policy team. This position, at a time when the U.S. is bombing Libya and threatening to reverse its original commitment to keep ground troops out of that country, confirms many onlookers’ suspicions of America’s motives in the region.

These suspicions were most poignantly given voice by Mohammed ElBaradei during the Egyptian uprising. "You are losing credibility by the day. On one hand you’re talking about democracy, rule of law and human rights, and on the other hand you’re lending still your support to a dictator that continues to oppress his people.”

If Obama is seen to be hypocritical in these matters, America loses gravity in the demands it makes from rogue/failed states (Iran most pressingly) who are up to no good.

I, for one, don’t find the idea of an America with enough diplomatic power to steer the course of world affairs very relaxing (not least because of its devotion to regimes like the Saudi one). On the other hand, it seems unlikely that America’s replacement in the position of “superpower” by Chinese or Russian authoritarianism would be particularly preferable, and so, for the time being, it would be nice to see America expand its goodwill cache (by conspicuously supporting democracy) in order to have greater capital from a diplomatic – as opposed to military – standpoint (and spend it conspicuously supporting democracy).

American foreign policy’s stated objectives are losing enough ground in Libya; it doesn’t need to continue hemorrhaging credibility in the land of Mecca and Medina too. 

The climate

Forcing corporations to pay taxes, removing money from elections, saving public unions’ collective bargaining rights, retaining reproductive health care privacy, achieving legal equality for homosexuals, overcoming dictatorships: all of the fights the left is currently waging in the US and worldwide are meaningless if the earth is inhospitable to human life a century from now.

Remember when the President spoke about the climate crisis terms like these? “Our generation's response to this challenge will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it -- boldly, swiftly, and together -- we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe.”

Well, by his second State of the Union address, climate change had gone from existential crisis to... what’s another word for “less important than salmon-based jokes?” The man didn’t mention the word “climate” once. Nor the phrase “global warming.” Problem solved, apparently.

Except it’s getting way worse. Not only does the industrial drive to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere show no signs of slowing, but such limited means as we have to combat it are under attack at the political level. Writes Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones: “Congressional Republicans have mounted an all-out assault on the EPA, pushing a lengthy list of measures to handcuff the agency from exercising its regulatory authority. For good measure, they are also trying to slash the agency's budget by a third.” That would be bad enough, but factor in the weakness of the President’s counterproposal and a very clear picture begins to emerge: neither the government nor regulatory state will avert coming climate disaster.

As always, the motivating factor for deep-cutting change will have to be a crisis. The problem is that we citizens are not in the same kind of distress the climate is. As the dream of 350 parts per million begins to take on a pipe-flavor, human beings retain relative immunity from suffering the effects clearly enough to spur us to mass action. And we won’t feel them until it’s too late.

What but the ability to ignore the crisis could set conservative columnists bellowing about the job-killing effects of climate policy that prohibits the production of light-bulbs shown conclusively to be dangerous? We’ll see how much their opposition to “big government” matters when the earth cannot sustain human life. This lack of concern has allowed the congress’s thinking to retard so deeply that the House Committee on Science and Technology recently began looking into what new chairman Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) has termed “the global warming or global freezing.”

Luckily, people change not just because they perceive threats to their bodies and institutions; they also change because they perceive threats to their wallets. I submit that the only way to rescue us from the plunge whence no return is possible is to make greenhouse gas emissions as costly to us as they are to the earth.

There’s an easy way of driving up oil prices to staggering highs, engineering a state of affairs in which the market very heavily favors alternative energies in short order. All it requires is that we ally ourselves not with the dictatorship that oversees the most oil-rich country in the world, but with its women, homosexuals, democrats, secularists and youth instead.

J.A. Myerson, Executive Editor of the Busy Signal, is the Artistic Director of Full of Noises and a teaching artist with Urban Arts Partnership. He writes primarily on American Politics and Human Rights. Follow him on Twitter.

Cross-posted from the IPS blog.

The UN climate talks held in Cancun late last year paved the way for a new Green Climate Fund to channel money for developing countries to build resiliency, protect forests, and bring low-carbon technologies and practices into mainstream use.

That marked a critical victory for developing countries, but the biggest fights have yet to come. In the coming year, a committee of 40 government representatives (25 from developing and 15 from developed countries) will be working furiously with the UN and other institutions, as well as finance, gender, community participation, and other experts, on making this fund a reality. They must do everything from creating a management structure to forging a global definition of "clean energy."

This ambitious task is meant to result in a Green Climate Fund that can handle the tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars a year developing countries will need in the coming decades to combat climate change and at the same time continue their fight against poverty.

It's fundamentally disturbing, however, that the World Bank — the planet’s leading cheerleader for a growth-without-limits development paradigm — is elbowing its way to the front of the line to help design the new fund, almost guaranteeing itself a permanent role in its management.

More than 90 environment, development, human rights, and anti-debt organizations from around the world conveyed this concern in a letter to the Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the convener of the first fund design meeting.

In the letter, civil society leaders called for strictly limiting the World Bank's role in the design on the Green Climate Fund for the following reasons:

First and foremost, the World Bank continues to finance dirty coal, oil and gas projects. According to a World Bank Group Energy Sector Financing Update prepared by the Bank Information Center, the global lender supported fossil fuel projects to the tune of $6.6 billion in 2010, a 116 percent increase from the year before. That included $4.4 billion for coal power projects, more than it spent on all new renewable energy and energy efficiency projects combined for the year ($3.4 billion). So while the World Bank is undeniably increasing it renewable energy financing, the volume is still dwarfed by its fossil fuel lending.

Bobby Peek, director of groundWork/Friends of the Earth South Africa, an environmental justice group in Durban, South Africa, that endorsed the NGO letter, noted, “Only a year ago the World Bank made its largest loan ever to dirty energy, signing $3.75 billion over to the Eskom energy company to build a 4,800MW coal-fired power station in South Africa.” He asked, “Is this the institution we want to put in charge funding the solutions to the climate crisis?”

Bank officials say that the Eskom power plant — and similar coal projects in other countries — are important for bringing access to electricity for energy-poor families. But environmentalists and local activists argue that the project will benefit large mines and smelters, not the local community. In fact, in an independent review of the Bank’s 26 fossil fuel loans in 2009 and 2010, Oil Change International found that none of these clearly identify access for the poor as a direct target of the project. The Bank agreed that not a single coal or oil project could be classified as improving energy access.

To the World Bank’s credit, it may be about to change course to a degree. A leaked draft of its new 10-year energy strategy revealed plans to move away from supporting new coal projects in middle-income countries. But environment and development groups argue that the language used in that draft document is riddled with loopholes. The energy plan also includes a massive scale-up of hydropower mega-dams that threaten to displace communities, destroy fisheries, and release their own greenhouse gases.

The Green Climate Fund should remain fully independent from the World Bank. Its design committee should engage experts from UN agencies and all regions of the world. Experts on gender, sustainable development, poverty alleviation, renewable energy and efficiency technologies, indigenous peoples, human rights, and social and environmental safeguards should weigh in, too.

Janet is co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, where she provides analysis of the international financial institutions’ energy investment and carbon finance activities.