World Bank Investigates Cognitive Challenges

The World Bank gives and the World Bank takes away.  With respect to climate change, the World Bank is funding the expansion of coal-fired power plants in India and China that will vastly increase the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere.  The World Bank also funds so-called climate change mitigation and adaptation programs.  What the WB does with its super-sized right hand it hides from the dwarfed, green left hand.

In similar fashion,  reports from the World Bank are often full of useful information, which is then not used much at all as projects are pursued.   K.M. Norgaard’s  “Cognitive and Behavioral Challenges in Responding to Climate Change” might have taken the executive offices of Bank officials as its field of investigation.  Instead, Norgaard’s earnest inquiry is, like climate change, global in scope.   But its focus on average individuals’ inaction in the face of the threat of climate change seems odd given the powerful interests that have opposed political action to address green house gas emissions.