Wolfowitz ‘Tried to Censor World Bank on Climate Change’

Tuesday, August 14, 2007 by the Independent/UK | Wolfowitz ‘Tried to Censor World Bank on Climate Change’ | by Andrew Gumbel

LOS ANGELES - 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.
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The GAP has uncovered evidence of one striking instance of Bush administration censorship. In 2006, the bank’s vice presidents responded to a request from the Group of Eight industrialised countries and commissioned a draft report entitled Climate Change, Energy and Sustainable Development: Towards an Investment Framework. They endorsed the report, according to the minutes of a meeting obtained by the GAP.

Subsequently, however, Mr Wolfowitz’s office put out a memo asking the team to rework the paper, “shifting from a climate lens mainly to a clean-energy lens”. The edited paper issued a few months later was eventually called Clean Energy and Development: Towards an Investment Framework. ....