This week, the World Bank announced it is abandoning its plans to devote nearly half its lending capacity to climate-related projects.
In a statement innocuously titled, “Update on the World Bank Group Climate Change Action Plan,” the World Bank announced it still plans to continue and extend the so-called “,” but it will be retiring the specific funding targets.
This comes after the Trump administration criticized the World Bank for being hyper-focused on what amounted to climate virtue signaling without providing any tangible economic development, as its charter requires. The World Bank was formed to reduce poverty, not to address Western elites’ climate mania.
In April of this year, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the International Monetary Fund and World Bank that the bank should “focus on its core mission of reducing poverty and increasing economic growth,” which Bessent said means directing funds to things that actually aid those ends, such as “delivering access to all technologies which can provide abundant, reliable, and affordable energy,” among other policies. He clarified that this means “jettisoning the World Bank Group’s 45% climate finance target that breeds inefficiency, distorts economic decision making, and moves the Bank away from its core mission.”
As the United States is the largest shareholder at the World Bank, it is no surprise that the group at least partially yielded to Trump’s pressure.
The World Bank will maintain its greenhouse gas “scorecards” and tracking data on climate “resilience” and whatnot, in what can be assumed is a hopeful maintenance of their climate action plan framework so that it can be easily revived when Trump is out of office.
The World Bank has been marching in lockstep with environmental propagandists from the beginning, often even leading the charge of climate alarmism by producing nonsense studies that attribute a variety of societal ills, like mass immigration and projections of crop failures, to global warming. These studies are hailed in the mainstream media as proof positive that climate change is a man-made catastrophe that can only be fixed by giving leftists more money and power and limiting ordinary people’s freedoms. It does not matter that they ignore or downplay all the other factors that contribute to issues like immigration; the goal has been to get people worked up about climate change, and if media hysteria is anything to go by, they have been successful.
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The withdrawal of the specific lending targets is a big deal and is yet another in a long series of cuts that the second Trump administration has delivered to the Climate Industrial Complex.
The once-extraordinarily powerful Net-Zero Banking Alliance completely fell apart after 2024. Multiple major news outlets have slashed their entire climate desks, major corporations are scaling back or eliminating their net-zero pledges, entire European countries are abandoning major parts of their renewables mandates. All of this occurred notably after President Trump eliminated climate-related project funding via USAID, walked away from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and withdrew U.S. funding from other United Nations climate projects.
It is almost as if the United States was for a long time the host to a million green leeches, supplying most of their sustenance, and without our support, they will either need to find another body to sustain themselves, or die.
The World Bank just delivered another blow to the immensely powerful and well-connected green movement, whose momentum seemed unstoppable just a few years ago. Let’s hope the hits keep coming.
Linnea Lueken ([email protected]) is a senior research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute. X: @LinneaLueken. H.
Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Illinois.
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Image: World Bank