Wolfowitz 'tried to censor World Bank on climate change'

[cal04]

Source: The Independent

The Bush administration has consistently thwarted efforts by the World Bank to include global warming in its calculations when considering whether to approve major investments in industry and infrastructure, according to documents made public through a watchdog yesterday.

On one occasion, the White House's pointman at the bank, the now disgraced Paul Wolfowitz, personally intervened to remove the words "climate change" from the title of a bank progress report and ordered changes to the text of the report to shift the focus away from global warming.

But the issue predates Mr Wolfowitz's appointment as president of the bank in June 2005. According to the Government Accountability Project (GAP), which has tracked efforts to censor debate on global warming, environmental specialists at the World Bank tried unsuccessfully to press for consideration of greenhouse- gas emissions in a paper written - but never published - in 2002.

It was politics that prevented the publication of that paper, according to one senior bank insider who spoke to the Los Angeles Times, and politics that has been the principal obstacle to progress since. Only now, with the Bush administration on the ropes politically and the scientific evidence for global warming reaching such critical mass that even President George Bush has been forced to acknowledge its reality, are those same bank officials trying again to put the issue on the agenda. "Our biggest obstacle has been that politically, is very controversial," Kristalina Georgieva, the bank's strategy and operations director for sustainable development, told the LA Times.

Read more: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2861732.ece

[Double T]

1. Damn, what a relief to get rid of ALL of these GD neocon lying criminals........

NOW the world has a chance to be a better place.

[dickbearton]

2. K&R.

[goforit]

3. So what else is new and when do we arrest these thugs?

[BrainGlutton]

4. Unfortunately, this would not appear to be a crime. AFAIK.

[The Backlash Cometh]

5. Not just suppressing science, but there also seems to be a clear conspiracy

crossing outside our borders and into the global arena. I smell a conservative think tank behind all this.