Ah, fact-checking. Where would we be without it?
Take, for instance, a recent story that made the rounds on social media. According to these reports, Oxfam — the British NGO — found that a huge chunk of the World Bank’s spending on climate change-related issues was “missing.”
Thank heavens for fact-checkers like the Australian Associated Press — a Poynter Institute-accredited fact-checker from down under — which set us all straight: “An Oxfam report did not find that $US41 billion has gone ‘missing’ from the World Bank’s climate change fund, contrary to claims online.”
What a relief. Instead, the AAP noted, the Oxfam report found that the World Bank just doesn’t really know where the money went.
See? Totally different!
The controversy centers around an Oct. 2024 report titled “Climate Finance Unchecked: How much does the World Bank know about the climate actions it claims?” Answer: not as much as it probably should.
The findings are front-loaded in a TL;DR on page two of the 33-page report, in case you’re not interested in reading the whole thing through: “Oxfam finds that for World Bank projects, many things can change during implementation. On average, actual expenditures on the Bank’s projects differ from budgeted amounts by 26–43% above or below the claimed climate finance. Across the entire climate finance portfolio, between 2017 and 2023, this difference amounts to US$24.28–US$41.32 billion,” the report states.
“No information is available about what new climate actions were supported and which planned actions were cut. Now that the Bank has touted its focus on understanding and reporting on the impacts of its climate finance, it is critical to stress that without a full understanding of how much of what the Bank claims as climate finance at the project approval stage becomes actual expenditure, it is impossible to track and measure the impacts of the Bank’s climate co-benefits in practice.”
The Oxfam report stated “generous accounting practices by different countries and providers, combined with the lack of transparency and consistency in how climate finance is defined, calculated, and reported, is at the root of the crisis of trust in climate finance.”
Is the climate finance industry a scam?
As the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists pointed out in a November summation of Oxfam’s findings, this is sort of a big deal when you consider how the World Bank is in the process, more or less, of turning itself into the Global Climate Change Savings & Loan.
“In recent years, the World Bank has touted its spending on climate finance and its plans to dramatically expand it,” the ICIJ noted.
“World Bank President Ajay Banga said in December that the bank had met its goal to devote 35% of its financing to climate three years ahead of schedule and set a new target of 45% by 2025. That goal is well within reach; the bank announced in September that its climate finance investments reached 44% of total financing, or $42.6 billion, over the past fiscal year. ‘We’re putting our ambition in overdrive,’ Banga said.”
The report underscored that there’s a huge difference between the World Bank’s ambition and the world bank’s accounting processes, however, and one that needs to be addressed. But both Oxfam and the AAP fact-checking team wanted to you to be sure that the NGO “was not alleging any mismanagement of funds due to corruption or waste; it was concerned about the World Bank’s reporting process for deviations in planned and actual climate finance.”
“This distinction is significant,” a spokesperson for Oxfam said.
“Oxfam’s report doesn’t suggest funds are missing but points to a transparency issue that makes it difficult to know precisely what the Bank is delivering in terms of climate finance: where it’s going and what it’s supporting.”
Yes, well, excuse us for sounding like negative Nancys, but this sounds a bit like one of those cheerful bosses who describes a major organizational setback as an “opportunity for breakthrough improvement.” Indeed it might b, on some level, but a Panglossian refusal to acknowledge the bedrock realities of the situation that accompanies it becomes downright hilarious — unless you’re on the hook for it, of course.
And if you’re an American, you are! According to a Congressional Research Service report, the U.S. contributes over 16 percent of the World Bank’s total capital through its financial commitments, and has significant voting power on all of the World Bank organizations that provide climate change funding.
Yes, this may be a drop in the bucket in terms of your tax dollars, and yes, there are bigger climate hustles bureaucrats have spent your cash on (hey, whatever happened to that promising green energy start-up Solyndra?), but the difference between “a transparency issue that makes it difficult to know precisely what the Bank is delivering in terms of climate finance” and “missing” sounds an awful lot like the difference between “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” and “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate; in fact, it was wrong.”
Of course, when it comes to virtually any other institutional spending issue, using the word “missing” to refer to something being lost or something being unaccounted for would be a distinction without a difference. Here, it’s unspoken why it’s problematic and why fact-checkers are taking issue with it: When it comes to spending on issues related to climate change and green energy, there are Good Guys and there are Bad Guys.
The Good Guys say this is merely an accounting quibble, the Bad Guys say that this means at least $24 billion and up to $41 billion of World Bank funds are somewhere in the ether of global finance thanks to variances in accounting practices that charitably be described as curious.
Thus, it’s not, “contrary to claims online,” missing. It’s just not accounted for! At this point, I’m not sure which is the bigger racket: dubious national or supranational funding of projects that fall loosely under the aegis of purported climate change mitigation, or fact-checking. At least this can be said about fact-checking: It costs a hell of a lot less.
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