"Industrial Nations Divide on Future World Bank Anti-Carbon Policy"

"From Norway to New Delhi, leaders are struggling to define the World Bank's role in eradicating energy poverty while keeping a lid on carbon emissions.

The global financial institution currently is revamping its blueprint for funding energy projects, a document it hopes to present to its board of directors by mid-2011. But in doing so, the bank finds itself confronting head-on some of the formidable policy questions that it previously had been able to resolve on a project-by-project basis.

Those are: how to bring energy to the 1.5 billion people in the world who live in darkness and another 2.5 billion without access to modern energy fuels without underwriting a mammoth increase in the global level of greenhouse gases -- and what precisely should the bank's policy be when it comes to the construction of major coal-fired power plants in developing countries?"

Lisa Friedman reports for ClimateWire August 17, 2010.