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The US just told the World Bank to stop obsessing about climate and get back to its core business of ending poverty. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called on the institution to remove the 45 percent of financing it devotes to climate projects and instead invest to “increase access to affordable and reliable energy, reduce poverty and boost growth.”

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The World Bank was created at the end of the Second World War to rebuild Europe, and then took on the mission of lifting poor people out of poverty. But as with the UN and many other international organizations, the bank set out on its climate path after the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, committing billions to climate and vowing to lead on green financing. Last year it poured $42.6 billion into climate projects. That is money that could not be used to address the world’s most desperate needs.

Research repeatedly shows that, dollar for dollar, core development investments — such as improving maternal health, advancing e-learning or enhancing agricultural yields — deliver much greater and faster benefits than climate spending.

In contrast, supporting efforts by poor countries to make aggressive cuts in emissions would yield negligible results on development or climate metrics. Adaptation measures such as flood defenses are somewhat better, but still pale in comparison with proven development strategies.

The president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga, has staunchly defended its climate targets. He said that poverty and climate should be tackled jointly. Such a glib claim just does not pass a logic test.

Tackling poverty through nutrition, health and education can quickly help hundreds of millions of people live better lives at low cost. Tackling poverty through climate action will do nothing by 2030, and even by the end of the century it will help only minimally.

Tackling poverty through climate action will do nothing by 2030, and even by the end of the century it will help only minimally

Bjorn Lomborg

Yet climate policy costs easily run into the trillions, while harming the world’s poor by driving up costs of fertilizers and energy.

As Bessent highlighted, right now developing nations need cheap, reliable energy to industrialize, create jobs and thrive, just as rich countries did a century ago and China did over more recent decades.

Most of Africa remains quite poor, with little access to energy beyond wood and hydro power. The average poor African only gets to use as much fossil fuel in a year as an American uses in less than nine days.

The World Bank aims to connect 300 million additional Africans to electricity supplies by 2030 through its Mission 300 initiative. This is a worthy goal that is at risk of sabotage by an ever-present fixation on renewables.

The bank’s Mission 300 partner, the Rockefeller Foundation, touts renewables as the “most cost-effective and rapid route to prosperity.” This is fantasy. While solar and wind can be cheaper than fossil fuels when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, it is infinitely costly with no sun or wind.

Reliable power requires extensive backup that drives up costs, and across the world, high solar and wind societies experience much higher electricity costs. This is why rich countries, despite their green rhetoric, still get more than three-quarters of their energy from fossil fuels.

The World Bank’s own client surveys show that people in poorer nations rank climate low on their list of concerns. While African leaders will politely speak about green issues with the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Bank, their actions speak more loudly.

Last year, Africa added 5 kilowatt-hours of electricity for each person from solar and wind. But it added almost five times more from fossil fuels, because they are cheaper and more reliable. Across all energy, not just electricity, Africa increased its solar and wind consumption a bit, but increased its fossil fuel consumption by a 22-times-greater amount.

Climate change demands action, but not at the expense of efforts to tackle poverty. Rich governments should invest in long-overdue research and development for breakthrough green technologies: affordable, reliable alternatives that everyone, rich and poor alike, will adopt. That is how we can solve climate challenges without sacrificing the vulnerable.

More countries need to get on board with the mission to return the World Bank to a focus on poverty. Raiding development funds for climate initiatives is not just misguided, it is an affront to human suffering.

• Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”