Another sceptic bites the dust – Climate Weekly

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World Bank president David Malpass meets with then Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro in 2019 (Photo credit: Palacio da Planalto)

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David Malpass is famously “not a scientist” and this week he announced he won’t be the president of the World Bank for much longer either.

So the World Bank’s attempt to evolve into an organisation that can tackle the climate crisis will soon be led by someone who doesn’t struggle to accept that the climate crisis is happening.

He’s promised to leave by June which means he may oversee the bank’s spring meeting in April.

This week, he revealed the bank will propose then to change the equity-to-loan ratio of one of its arms from 20% to 19%.

That will free up $4bn a year, much of which will be spent on climate programmes. But it’s a tweak, not a transformation.

This week’s stories

Transformation is what is needed, as a new study shows the scale of the climate task.

Under the IPCC’s 1.5C scenarios, the study shows that coal-reliant economies like China, India and South Africa must phase out coal faster than any country has ever phased out any energy source before.

That’s not impossible. Records are there to be broken and sometimes smashed. Ask Usain Bolt.

But we’re going to need to go fast and Malpass was dragging us back.

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