Rich nations must take the lead in a clean-energy revolution

US politics have prevented the World Bank from raising money to expand its poverty-fighting work, Colombian economist Jose Antonio Ocampo said Tuesday as he pitched his candidacy to lead the development lender.Ocampo said the Bank needed to raise capital to expand its operations, but that outgoing Bank president Robert Zoellick had not pushed hard enough to boost funding.The result was a cutback in Bank loans for poverty fighting operations, he said.

I haven't been covering Copenhagen, because it has been abundantly clear to me from the beginning that nothing would be achieved.  Everyone's looking at the US . . . and the US Congress can't even deliver on pitifully small reduction targets.  Mostly, this always seemed like an opportunity to eat caviar and hobnob earnestly.  

The global economic crisis has slammed efforts to cut poverty worldwide, but plans are still on track to meet a key goal by 2015, the World Bank said here on Friday.However, elsewhere in the fight to improve conditions in poor countries, the picture was less rosy."The global economic crisis has slowed the pace of poverty reduction in developing countries, and is hampering progress toward the other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)," the bank's Global Monitoring Report 2010 said.

The Economist -- "The past four years have seen an economic crisis coincide with a food-price spike. That must surely have boosted the number of the world’s poor (especially since food inflation hits the poor hardest)—right? Wrong.