Pledging Meeting for Climate Investment Funds - September 26, 2008
Donor	CIF Contributions ($US million)*
Australia	127
France	300
Germany	813
Japan	1,200
Netherlands	50
Sweden	92
Switzerland	20
United Kingdom	1,488
United States	2,000
Other	50
Total Pledges	6,141
Additional Co-Financing (bi-lateral funding)
France	200
Germany	74
*All pledges are subject to approval by the relevant parliamentary or federal authorities. Contributions calculated using exchange rates as of September 25, 2008

1. The CTF should leverage investment in transformational technologies and support progressive policies. Investments should prioritize renewable energy projects in the electricity sector and energy efficiency in both the power generation and transport sectors. They should also create enabling policy and regulatory frameworks that will support the wide scale deployment of clean energy.
2. The CTF should operate in accordance with widely accepted principles reflected in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other sustainable development instruments. Donor governments should ensure that their financial commitments supplement—not supplant—existing official development assistance (ODA). They should also support poverty alleviation and sustainable development priorities of developing countries. Governance of the funds must be transparent, inclusive and accountable.
3. The CIFs should result in the transformation of the energy lending portfolios of the Multilateral Development Banks entrusted with administering these funds. Over the last three years, the World Bank alone has invested some $6.6 billion in the energy and mining sectors alone; and an additional $11 billion in the transport sector. By its own estimates, at least a quarter of its $30 billion portfolio is at significant risk from the impacts of climate change. Yet the Bank still does not seem to be systematically factoring climate change into all of its investment choices (see chart below). The MDBs can do more to ensure that all of their investments take climate change into account. A crucial step is for the Banks to begin measuring and managing the GHG emissions associated with their investments.

Public water agencies are only receiving 35% of their annual allocation from the State Water Project this year â€' the lowest level...

Pledging Meeting for Climate Investment Funds - September 26, 2008
Donor	CIF Contributions ($US million)*
Australia	127
France	300
Germany	813
Japan	1,200
Netherlands	50
Sweden	92
Switzerland	20
United Kingdom	1,488
United States	2,000
Other	50
Total Pledges	6,141
Additional Co-Financing (bi-lateral funding)
France	200
Germany	74
*All pledges are subject to approval by the relevant parliamentary or federal authorities. Contributions calculated using exchange rates as of September 25, 2008

1. The CTF should leverage investment in transformational technologies and support progressive policies. Investments should prioritize renewable energy projects in the electricity sector and energy efficiency in both the power generation and transport sectors. They should also create enabling policy and regulatory frameworks that will support the wide scale deployment of clean energy.
2. The CTF should operate in accordance with widely accepted principles reflected in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other sustainable development instruments. Donor governments should ensure that their financial commitments supplement—not supplant—existing official development assistance (ODA). They should also support poverty alleviation and sustainable development priorities of developing countries. Governance of the funds must be transparent, inclusive and accountable.
3. The CIFs should result in the transformation of the energy lending portfolios of the Multilateral Development Banks entrusted with administering these funds. Over the last three years, the World Bank alone has invested some $6.6 billion in the energy and mining sectors alone; and an additional $11 billion in the transport sector. By its own estimates, at least a quarter of its $30 billion portfolio is at significant risk from the impacts of climate change. Yet the Bank still does not seem to be systematically factoring climate change into all of its investment choices (see chart below). The MDBs can do more to ensure that all of their investments take climate change into account. A crucial step is for the Banks to begin measuring and managing the GHG emissions associated with their investments.

1. Multi-hundred-billion-dollar-sized government action happens only when there is a very, very big crisis. Yes, lots of people out there think happy talk about clean energy and green collar jobs is mainly what you need to get a massive government spending program. Not gonna happen. The happy talk can help sell the needed policies, but without the crisis, it leads nowhere.


2. A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a crisis to be "very, very big" is that it must be labeled as such by very serious people who are perceived as essentially nonpartisan opinion leaders. In this case, it was the panic from people like uber-billionaire Warren Buffet and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan and even people like CNBC's Jim Cramer (yes, he shouts a lot, but he called this meltdown a year ago and has a lot of credibility with the media).


3. In addition, bad things must be happening to regular people right now. It was quite interesting that the House in particular voted down the original bailout, but reversed itself in large part because of the ensuing stock market meltdown and in part because they started to hear from all of the small and large businesses in their districts that the credit market was freezing up.


4. The credible people must say that the government action is going to solve the problem. This is a crucial point also missed by lots of people. If Buffet and Bernanke and Cramer said the sky is falling but your plan ain't going to stop it, then your plan is dead, dead, dead.

1. We have one very big crisis that requires multi-hundred-billion-sized government action (peak oil). And we have a far, far bigger and more dangerous crisis that requires far, far more government action (global warming). The "good news," if one can call it that, is the crises are real and imminent -- and they do lend themselves to government-led solutions. Also, like the bailout, the total dollar "cost" of the solution is not the total dollar cost to the taxpayer, since, for the bailout, the underlying financial assets the government will buy have value and, for global warming, the cap-and-trade bill plus clean tech push will create massive energy savings and whole new industries.


2. But we simply don't have a critical mass of credible nonpartisan opinion leaders who understand the nature of our energy and climate problem. When the heck are people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates going to speak up on dire nature of the global warming situation, rather than, say, scoping out climate-destroying investments in Canada? Yes, we have virtually the entire scientific community begging for strong action, but they aren't opinion leaders in this country anymore and indeed they aren't credible to a large segment of U.S. society. Meeting this necessary condition for serious action is greatly complicated by the conservative crusade against climate action, which is not just a disinformation campaign but a concerted effort to label any scientist or journalist or opinion maker who speaks out on global warming as just a stooge of the left-wing eco-imperialists -- "environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation," as Charles Krauthammer put it, or "more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives" as George Will put it. In short, the disinformation campaign seeks to discredit all credible calls for action.


3. Bad things are happening to real people right now thanks in part to human-caused climate change -- droughts, wildfires, flooding, extreme weather, and on and on. But many environmentalists and journalists downplay the causality or think it is a mistake to talk about those things. And, of course, we have the disinformation campaign telling everybody either that the future won't be too bad. Michael Crichton says he is "underwhelmed" by the problem after his "review" of the science. George Will says that climate change might even be "beneficial," and NYT columnist Jon Tierney writes, "There's a chance the warming could be mild enough to produce net benefits." Heck, we even have the GOP vice presidential pick telling 70 million Americans last week that climate change impacts stem from "cyclical temperature changes on our planet." In this classic denier myth, all we have to do is wait and the storm will pass.


4. The government-led climate and energy actions that might be politically possible today won't solve the crisis. That was certainly true of the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill. Consider the peak oil/energy dependence crisis. Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is a semi-credible opinion maker who has certainly been raising the alarm on peak oil. But he has ignored the climate problem and offered an energy independence plan that won't actually make us energy independent and is neither practical nor a good idea. So he is not merely flushing his money down the toilet, he is actually confusing the public on what the actual solution might be. Similarly, some people think that we should focus our messaging on "energy independence not global warming," but they propose spending $30 to $50 billion a year on technology, a plan that does not seem to have any major Congressional support, nor is it likely to garner much since a government-spending-based approach can't possibly solve the peak oil/energy dependence crisis, which inherently requires a very strong regulatory component.