We need your help this Friday to call on the World Bank Group to direct its energy lending to provide healthy, clean energy access to the world’s poor. Currently, 1.4 billion people mostly in rural Asia and Africa are without access to electricity. The World Bank says that alleviating this energy poverty is one of its goals, but energy lending just doesn’t match up to the Bank’s rhetoric. We have an opportunity to change all that.
Join the rally this Friday, April 15, to call on the World Bank to Support Energy for the Poor not the Big Corporations.
The World Bank is currently revising its Energy Strategy, which once approved, will guide public lending over the next decade. Now is the time to call on the Bank to put its money where its mouth is.
The Bank says its goals are to increase access to electricity for the poor and shift to environmentally sustainable energy. It’s actual energy lending tells a different story. Lending for big fossil fuel projects went up 400 percent in the last 5 years, from $1.5 billion in 2006 to $6.2 billion in 2010. And in 2010, the Bank lent a record $4.4 billion just to dirty coal projects that did not benefit the poor.
Join the rally with us this Friday, April 15, to Get the World Bank Out of Fossil Fuels.
Young people from across the country will gather in Washington DC at Power Shift 2011. While they organize for a clean energy future, the World Bank Group is negotiating an energy strategy that may just end up giving more money to fossil fuel and coal projects in developing countries.
We will gather at 2 p.m. Friday, April 15th, in Edward R Murrow Park, H and 18th Street NW, in Washington D.C. Edward R Murrow park is a few blocks from the Farragut West (Blue line) and Farragut North Metro (Red line).
Join us. The rally is sponsored by Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth US, The Institute for Policy Studies, Jubilee USA, Bank Information Center, groundWork South Africa, 350.org and Sierra Club.