AGW and International Wealth Transfer to Bankers

by Dennis Ambler

The Banks are after our money again. 

“Using public funds to remove risks” means that the wealthy may take any level of risk to further enrich themselves, because if anything brings huge losses, the taxpayers will be forced to bail them out.  If the risks result in huge returns for the wealthy, the taxpayers received zero.  Investment and loan guarantees by governments to large corporations and banks are wealth transfers at best, theft at worse.

this account comes from the Climate Group website: The Climate Group.

Date:July 23, 2011

“NEW YORK: On July 20, The Climate Group and Theodore Roosevelt IV of Barclays Capital hosted a roundtable dialogue with Andrew Steer, Special Envoy for Climate Change at the World Bank with senior members of the financial sector, to discuss how public sector funding could be used to stimulate the nearly $1 trillion of private sector investment needed to address climate change worldwide.

Participating organizations included: Barclays Capital, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNY Mellon, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, MEAG New York Corporation, Morgan Stanley and Sustainable Development Capital. 

Andrew Steer opened the meeting by framing the challenge, asking the attendees how a relatively small amount of public funds, such as the World Bank supported Climate Investment Funds and the nascent Global Green Fund, could be deployed to leverage much greater amounts of private sector investment.

He said the outcomes of the meeting would feed into the World Bank’s paper on how to engage the private sector that was requested by the G20.

Acknowledging the challenges that the private sector currently face investing in some developing countries, such as identifying viable projects and accounting for political risks, participants coalesced around a number of practical suggestions including:

• Using public funds to remove existing risks and improve the investment climate in developing countries (e.g. guaranteeing existing public policy incentives and power purchase agreements);
• Developing “bankable” models for energy investments in developing countries (e.g. through larger regional integration and small-scale distributed generation models); and
• Leveraging the experience of organizations like the IFC to help identify viable projects.”

Andrew Steer is the former Director of Policy and Research at the UK Department for International Development. He was appointed to this new post of World Bank Special Envoy for Climate Change in 2010.

Theodore Roosevelt IV is The chairman of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, former chairman of the ill-fated Lehman Brothers’ Global Council on Climate Change, a board member of the Alliance for Climate Protection, whose chairman is Al Gore and a board member of the World Resources Institute, also with Al Gore.