By Jo Nova
Each year the World Bank hands out about $120 billion dollars in grants and loans to poor and middle income countries. But with 670 million people still without access to electricity, you’d think they’d have more important things to do than trying to slow storms in 100 years time.
However The World Bank is a pure creature of The Blob — dependent on Big Government handouts, and comfortably one or two degrees of separation away from any voters or accountability which makes it free to waste money on vainglorious trivia.
Unfortunately for the apparatchik the US is the world’s biggest funder of The World Bank, and President Trump has been giving them a hard time. A few months ago, Scott Bessent called on the World Bank to get back to their core mission — saying they’d lost their way trying to work in climate change, gender, and fashionable social issues. They do have a policy to end poverty by “accelerating gender equity” — if you can believe.
The world’s poor need roads, ports, clean water and reliable electricity, not a prize for participation in a global rain dance. If the loans have to fit in a sacred climate box, countries end up designing a show-case grid instead of the grid they need.
How many people died of cold or hunger who could have been saved if the World Bank helped them build a coal fired power plant instead of a wind farm or a gender equity conference?
World Bank to abandon goal to devote 45% of lending resources to climate change projects
Reuters
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in 2025 had ordered the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to return to their core missions of development and financial stability, arguing they had strayed too far into climate, gender and other areas opposed by the Trump administration. In April, he said the bank’s “myopic” focus on climate financing targets had to go.
It’s Trump versus The Blob:
Executive directors including France and 18 other shareholding countries had signed a letter last October endorsing the bank’s continued work on climate change, but the largest shareholder, the United States, declined to sign, along with executive directors representing Russia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, while India and Japan abstained.
It’s unusual enough for Politico to use the words Trump and wins, in the same sentence.
Trump wins climate battle at the World Bank
By Arianna Skibel, Politico
Eliminating the spending target marks a victory for President Donald Trump, whose administration has described it as “distortionary” and “nonsensical.”
As its largest shareholder, the United States holds sway over World Bank decisions. And the administration spent months pressuring it to drop the climate finance target, which U.S. officials said must go despite other countries indicating their support.
Hallelujah. Every cent that goes to The Blob makes it stronger. The money buys experts, press releases, lawfare, and a dependent cheer squad.
h/t Another Ian
UPDATE: To appreciate just how awful the World Bank is — see them brag that they have “not made any coal investments for over a decade”. They have deprived the poor in the third world from getting access to cheap electricity. They stopped investing in upstream oil and gas in 2019.
Meanwhile they are the “biggest multilateral funder” of climate investments in developing countries, which means, presumably giving unreliable power to people who desperately need real electricity, while they pump money to China to make more useless solar panels and wind towers. h/t David Maddison.
A significant presidency in so many ways. Brash, unconventional, but sees the world clearly. If he can turn the West back from this disastrous self destruction, he will secure his place in history.
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Another win for Trump!
I will have to add this to his long list of achievements!
TAW!
And it is another win for common sense and rational policy as well.
Hurrah.
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Next. Stop our own banks from withholding funding for coal and gas projects here. Considering that both coal and gas are going gangbusters now, and will continue to do so, the banks are ignoring profits for their shareholders which is probably illegal.
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Pedant Alert ⚠️
To save your wrists/fingers from RSI (and to save time) when “$120 billion” is written with the dollar sign included, the word “dollars” at the end is superfluous (unnecessary) as it reads: “120 billion dollars dollars”. Also: “It’s Trump versus The Blob”.
Ironic advice, I know, from someone who typed ‘dammed’ for ‘damned’ the other day: I blame the QWERTY layout for putting the ‘m’ right nextdoor to the ‘n’ … doh!
Apart from that minor technical quibble, thanks for providing constructive & positive information about Trump’s administration – all we hear over here are edited misquotes and silly ‘opinions’ from young, green, ignorant climatistas who can barely count beyond five, maybe ten if they use both hands.
Trump Won : Blob Lost 😃
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More good news and commonsense from the Trump team and hopefully every country will benefit and many more baseload power stations will be built.
They should now create a new team devoted to stopping the funding of useless, super expensive, unreliable and dangerous W & S ASAP.
Every country should also understand that more baseload energy security means more national security.
Of course countries will also save their environments and animal habitats as well.
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More good news and commonsense from the Trump team and hopefully every country will benefit and many more baseload power stations will be built.
They should now create a new team devoted to stopping the funding of useless, super expensive, unreliable and dangerous W & S ASAP.
Every country should also understand that more baseload energy security means more national security.
Of course countries will also save their environments and animal habitats as well.
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Sorry, I don’t know how that duplicate comment occurred.
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A smart trick to get more “likes” for your post!
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When I was a guitar player in a jazz big band, the last gig I played before being fired was a huge soiree for the World Bank employees at the Hinckley Hilton, same Ballroom where there was an attempt on DJT.
We played a couple of dinner sets.
Afterwards the entire room did the Macarena non-stop for a minimum of an hour until the event wound down.
They’re a bit trendy.
It’s one of my Post Musician Stress Disorder flashbacks.
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You went through a lot Honk. The things one must endure live on in us.
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Story from that same gig.
There was an older tenor sax player I had not met before.
Super cool African American gentleman about 6’4″.
His son was a first rate trumpet player I had played with several times.
He told me he had been in the 82nd (if I remember right) Airborne in Korea.
Before leaving the States he had auditioned for the division jazz band.
He didn’t make it and he had walked around afterward crying because he wanted it so bad.
The entire band was killed in Korea.
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A new form of TDS- Trump Defunds Shysters.
If an organisation is behaving however it likes rather than acting according to its brief, nothing better to bring it back into line than stripping it of funding.
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Many people are unaware that business man Donald Trump was opposed to United Nations left leaning activities for decades, he spoke often against the UN Lima Protocol of 1975 that was non-binding but taken up by most member countries effectively agreeing to the transfer of manufacturing industry businesses and know how to UN “developing nations” like China, and the related free trade agreements/arrangements recommended that removed tariff barriers and other trade related restrictions for developing countries.
Soon after he became POTUS he addressed the UN in New York and told delegates that the UN must downsize and get back to what it was originally established to do. That they must stop interfering in the affairs of sovereign nation members and much more.
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Donald hasn’t won that one. Yet.
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Trump wants measurable achievements, not endless bloviation and self congratulatory fawning with zero actual accomplishments.
Or, the US cuts off the money.
The UN and World Bank can either produce actual results, or “Go Fund Themselves”, read that however you wish.
The times of offloading generational failures onto the backs of US taxpayers is Over. Read the Room. Get onboard or get lost.
Results solve problems, feed people, and raise living standards. The luxury of self congratulation, paid for by others, is Over.
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Yesterday I was dismayed to see that the World Meteorological Organisation is also a branch of the UN. It is currently warning of extreme heating when, in fact, the incoming Solar Radiation is at a maximum and the Northern Hemisphere is at its maximum tilt towards the Sun so of course it is hot in Europe, nothing to do with fossil fuels or human activity.
Further scare tactics are to be seen on the web site for the World Health Organisation regarding cholera and ebola. In addition they have a new Pandemic Agreement to bind our Government to their demands.
It is time that we either withdraw from the UN or have the Charter altered so that the Secretary-General only serves a 3 or 4 year term and each subsequent Secretary-General is from a different nation. Otherwise we are in danger of a Communist takeover of the World’s Nations.
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It all happened in 1988. The WMO wanted to be a big group with funding. Al Gore was in 1988 a candidate for President. And James Hanson of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory was like most of NASA, looking for something to do. He was an expert on CO2 on Venus. And the UN wanted to control the weather, breathing and taxes.
It was an unholy and utterly opportunistic alliance and the IPCC was created specifically as the name says, for Climate Change. Suddenly UN politicians (IntergovernmentallPolitical Panel) controlled the world’s weather (Climate Change) with the explicit purpose of stopping the weather from changing. And a farcical monster was born with the full support of the WMO. Climate taxes will surely come.
Today, 38 years later, the UN want another $1Trillion to fix Climate Change and transfer wealth to poor communist countries and often military dictatorships from rich Democracies. So the unelected retired politicians of the UN and the boring meteorologists of the WMO and the out of a job NASA scientists will have something to do. Climate Little was born. The sky is falling..
And the leader, an Indian Railway engineer, IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachaurim boasted that he flew 360,000km a year, 1,000km a day to tell the world not to fly. The hypocrisy has never stopped. It’s all about the money. From the start.
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The World Bank and UN are preventing progress in the Third World by not allowing funding for coal or gas power stations, but expect them to install intermittent generators like wind and solar. They’re fine to power a night time light or two so kids can do homework but not suitable for any significant commercial or industrial use.
Thus Third World nations will continue to fail to progress and Woke Western countries will continue to regress to Third wWrld status, as per the plan.
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Gukag AI:
They have lifted their nuclear ban and will apparently fund that but good luck implementing that in a Third World Country. We can’t even manage that in Australia.
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Thanks David, you inspired me to add this to post.
UPDATE: To appreciate just how awful the World Bank is — see them brag that they have “not made any coal investments for over a decade”. They have deprived the poor in the third world from getting access to cheap electricity. They stopped investing in upstream oil and gas in 2019.
Meanwhile they are the “biggest multilateral funder” of climate investments in developing countries, which means, presumably giving unreliable power to people who desperately need real electricity, while they pump money to China to make more useless solar panels and wind towers.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/factsheet/2021/10/29/10-things-you-didn-t-know-about-the-world-bank-group-s-work-on-climate?cid=ECR_FB_worldbank_EN_EXT
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That’s like the Medieval practice of “bloodletting” a severely sick patient.
And that’s appropriate because wind energy is indeed a Medieval form of energy.
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The precise source of the quote:
Is at:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/12/15/just-transition-away-from-coal-to-attract-investment-create-new-jobs-in-poland
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It should tell you something when hundreds, or even thousands of International organisations, government departments, N.G.O.’s, political parties, banks, large corporations, fund managers, celebrity ‘influencers’, activist groups, universities, ‘scientific experts’ and others have all been co-opted to try to force the populace into accepting a change in their way of life they never asked for and for the most part, believe to be unnecessary.
The dictionary meaning of ‘conspiracy’ according to Google AI is ;’..a secret plan or agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal, harmful, or treacherous act.’ Q.E.D.
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