world-bank

- I’m in Qatar, a place slightly smaller than Connecticut, prosaically described in my travel guide app as “mainly flat and barren desert, covered with loose sand and gravel”. There’s not a lot of desert left in its capital, Doha, just a vast sea of choked-up highways (serious SUV traffic!) and low-rise buildings punctuated by monumentalist skyscrapers, all thanks to huge natural gas resources. Pity we're going to have to leave a large part of that gas in the ground if we're going to avoid catastrophic climate change.

> Canada's Brookfield Renewable issued a $176m bond to fund a new 45 MW hydroelectric project in British Columbia. Interest rate is 4.45%, fully amortizing over a term of, yes you read it right, 41 years. The bonds are rated A (low) with a stable trend by DBRS. Scotia Capital was the private placement agent.

> God I love engineers! I’m beside the River Liffey in Dublin to speak at the International Conference on Ocean Energy. The marine engineering being discussed here is amazing – huge underwater tidal turbines, wave-catchers of all sorts, a cool Norwegian underwater “sail”. Bits of test kit are all over the place, like a giant Mechano game. It breathes innovation. All still pre- or near-commercial stage, so not exactly bonds yet, but definitely hope.

It’s sunny in Venice today; I’ve just caught the vaporetto across to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore to a Climate Policy Initiative/World Bank/OECD meeting on “Expanding Green, Low-Emissions Finance”.

> The European Investment Bank (EIB) lends more to clean energy than any other bank in the world. That’s something for Europe to be proud of. But CEE Bankwatch has just shown how, in a way that undermines the EU’s emission reduction targets, the EIB also continues to lend to coal-fired power stations. In fact they lent more this year than last.