Low- and middle-income countries need more resources to meet the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change. The entire global community favors such assistance in principle, but concrete supportive action by high-income countries has lagged behind promises. Some commentators, including influential economists, think that they have found a silver bullet: the special drawing right (SDR), an international reserve asset created in 1969 by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and periodically distributed to its membership, most recently in the amount of $650 billion in 2021. This special…
