Banking on Climate Finance for Latin America

Kevin Gallagher

Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries arrived in Paris with ambitious national commitments to combat climate change.  Mexico promises to reduce peak emissions even before China’s landmark commitment; Chile has said it will introduce a carbon tax; Brazil has put forth a strategic plan on reducing emissions and deforestation; and Caribbean nations have come with a dire message, reminding the world that their livelihoods are at stake if the world sticks with more business-as-usual, as the Caribbean continues to be subject to ever increasing sea-level rise, flooding, and extreme weather events.

But these promises and plans won’t come cheap. LAC governments will need to make significant financial investments to meet their climate change commitments.  According to the Inter-American Development Bank, the region faces a $100 billion annual gap in financing for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

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What We’re Writing, What We’re Reading

What We’re Writing

Juan Antonio Montecino and Gerald Epstein, The Political Economy of QE and the Fed: Who Gained, Who Lost and Why Did it End? (See also Triple Crisis co-editor Alejandro Reuss’s interview with Gerald Epstein on the distributional impact of Quantitative Easing, here.)

Martin Khor, In the Aftermath of the Attacks

Sunita Narain, Alternative Paris

Matias Vernengo, What to Expect in Argentina (video, in Spanish) (See also Matias Vernengo’s blog posts on Argentina and the recent elections, here and here.)

What We’re Reading

Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street (New book. Read the entire introduction here.)

Robert Pollin, Four Reasons Why We Can and Must Fight Terrorism and Poverty Through Climate Action

Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Vikas Rawal, Emulating the U.S. Opposed by the U.S.

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Right Wing Turn in Latin America?

Matías Vernengo

Regular Triple Crisis contributor Matias Vernengo reflects on the recent presidential election results from Argentina. See his Triple Crisis blog post about the main issues in the election, written just before the run-off round, here.

Just a brief follow up on my recent post on Argentina. By a relative small margin the right wing candidate, Mauricio Macri, won the election. As noted in the previous post the most dangerous result would be an attack on the human rights policies followed by the current government, that have led to jail more than 400 human rights violators (noted that several were acquitted by lack of proofs as it should happen in a civilized society; so this was not witch hunt).

La Nación, the main conservative daily, that benefited economically from the last dictatorship and supported it, had an editorial demanding an end to ‘revenge.’ They called the left of center militants the true terrorists of the 1970s, even though the vast majority had committed no violent crime (and even those that did commit crimes should have been prosecuted according to the law, not tortured, and summarily executed). Macri has suggested that he will not stop the judiciary system from prosecuting human rights violators. But he made it clear that this will not be part of government policy.

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