Poor countries should be provided with $300bn a year from the International Monetary Fund to finance their fight against the climate crisis, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says. Via The Guardian:
Speaking to the Guardian at the IMF’s annual meeting in Marrakech, Stiglitz said developing nations needed their equivalent of the US Inflation Reduction Act – a package of grants and subsidies designed to promote green growth and jobs.
Stiglitz said the battle against global heating would only be won if poor countries were onboard but there was no hope of them coming up with their equivalent of the act, which he said was expensive and flawed but working.
Instead, he said rich countries should support the creation of $300bn of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs) each year to finance a global green transition.
What he says makes sense -- which is why it's so unlikely to happen.
“Developing countries can’t do it on any scale. Unless developing countries and emerging markets reduce their emissions, no matter what pieties we do in the US and Europe, we will get global warming. The rhetoric is about doing something about climate change and then rather than getting onboard [the people] you most need to get onboard, you alienate them.”
The act was originally sold by the US president, Joe Biden, as a $370bn plan to rebuild the country’s industrial base by boosting investment in projects designed to achieve net zero. Stiglitz said the actual size of the stimulus could turn out to be $1.5tn. “It is an open-ended tax credit. The good thing is that we are getting a lot of green investment.”
