The time has come to revisit my earlier pleas to promote clean energy as an engine of sustainable growth. After sounding the alarm for 20 years on largely deaf ears in the wilderness of a treeless forest.

Bangladesh will receive $100 million loan from the World Bank to expand its clean energy activities, a senior government official said on Tuesday.

More than three quarters of the loan will be spent on the government’s solar energy programme and the rest will be used to buy compact fluorescent lamp bulbs known as CFL bulbs.

The government plans to finance installation of 1.0 million solar panels over the next couple of years and will distribute about 27.5 million low-wattage CFL bulbs across the country.

“It is a massive programme for the government and will not be possible to implement without financial support from our development partners like the World Bank,” said the official at the economic relations division of the finance ministry.

The state-run Rural Electrification Board and Infrastructure Development Company Limited are jointly implementing the government’s renewable energy development programme.

The World Bank will provide the fund by the end of May, the official said, adding use of solar energy in Bangladesh had been rising annually by more than 50 percent since 2004.

World focus

President Obama boldly give clean energy the status of a national priority in his first State of the Union address. Obama did so in several passages not as a throwaway to appease some narrow constituency but as an integral and essential part of his overall message of building a strong economy of the future.

• “There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains, or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products.”

• “We should put more Americans to work building clean energy facilities — and give rebates to Americans who make their homes more energy-efficient, which supports clean energy jobs.”

• “And no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy. You can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy…”

• “But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives…”

• “Yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.”