Wolfowitz deputy allegedly tried to weaken climate-change message
The brouhaha over World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz giving financial favors to his lady friend is spreading into a look at whether he’s been pushing the Bush administration agenda on family planning and climate change. The bank’s chief scientist, Robert Watson, says Wolfowitz deputy Juan José Daboub tried to edit climate change out of a clean-energy strategy paper last year. “He tried to water it down,” said Watson, a former NASA official and former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Daboub tried to delete the phrase “climate change” in some places and change it to “climate risk” and “climate variability” in others, inserting doubt that Watson says counters bank policy. Two other officials supported the assertion. Daboub defended himself against the climate and family-planning clause claims, saying, “I am here to carry out the bank’s policies, not my own.” Wolfowitz, meanwhile, is thrashing about like a bat trapped in a trashcan, begging for time to defend himself.
