Since 2015 the “advanced economies” have been pledged to provide $100 billion/year in concessionary loans or grants to the developing nations in exchange for those nations’ agreement to abandon economic development of various kinds, from fossil fuel-based electricity to mechanized agriculture. But these “advanced economies” have never since come up with the committed funds. This fuels resistance to the Paris Agreements and the Green New Deal, since the advanced economies generate most carbon “emissions” while the underdeveloped nations get whipped to give up carbon fuels and economic sectors.
On Aug. 23 the IMF stepped in on this broken promise, announcing the release of $650 billion in new IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to more than 200 member countries. The IMF had not issued SDRs since 1972. Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva bragged that these rights to borrow would include to $270 billion for all the developing nations — although only $21 billion for low-income countries. Against tens of trillions in needed new infrastructure investment in the underdeveloped nations this is a pittance; and the fact that the borrowers are constrained to keep the funds in major-country hard currencies, will earmark them for repaying existing foreign debts, and otherwise for flight capital and corruption.
But Georgieva, in announcing the SDRs, claimed to have a solution: The 22 “advanced” nations, which have the right to borrow nearly $400 billion of these SDRs, should put them into an IMF “Resilience and Sustainability Trust,” which could “use channeled SDRs to help the most vulnerable countries with … confronting climate-related challenges.” Thus, bribe the poorer nations with IMF money with a new kind of “conditionalities": climate conditionalities. Let the 22 industrialized nations — which would otherwise have no interest in using their SDRs — claim this as the aid they promised in 2015 to the underdeveloped countries for abandoning industrialization.
