Bessent: World Bank Should Lift Ban to Allow Upstream Oil, Gas Financing

The significance lies less in the policy itself than in the messenger: the sitting US Treasury Secretary using the World Bank's own governance channel to press a lending-policy change, which puts the institution's climate-finance posture directly in tension with its largest shareholder. The immediate audience is the Bank's board and borrowing governments weighing whether to reopen a funding stream many had treated as closed. Whether Bessent's push translates into a formal proposal, and whether other shareholders align with or resist it, is the open question.