For the poorest in the world there are more things that are far more important to survival than climate change. Third world countries are the big losers of today’s climate activism. Why? Because they still lack purified drinking water, sewage sanitation, adequate nutrition, reliable electricity (or any at all), adequate health care, i.e., the infrastructures and products we take for granted that are all based on deep earth minerals and fuels.
Yes, there are billions of people in underdeveloped countries who are currently living in pre-industrial days of existence that developed countries left behind more than a century ago. After the assimilation in the early 1900s of the automobile and airplane into regular societal structure, they have yet to join the industrial revolution. Without oil and natural gas, they may never get that opportunity.
For the minority of folks in the world that occupy the developed countries, they have big problems of their own. Like home Internet quitting for 15 minutes? Bad mobile signal? Online deliveries arriving late? Can’t fast-forward live TV? A closet full of clothes but “nothing to wear”? Sitting near an infant on a flight to Bali? Chipped nail polish?
Currently, underdeveloped countries, mostly from energy starved countries, are experiencing 11 million child deaths every year, and mainly from preventable causes. Efforts to reduce emissions may do more harm than good to the almost 8 billion on this earth, especially to the world’s poorest.
Life in underdeveloped countries is a clone to life in the Middle Ages, littered with the dusty debris from the detritus of daily life. People and farm animals running everywhere, most with no potable water. Children dressed in filthy clothing. Garbage strewn in the streets, mostly unpaved. These poor people have little hope of ever lifting themselves out of real poverty.
Can anyone comprehend that the homeless in America may be living a better life than 80% of humanity?
Depriving the poorest from all the things we take for granted that “move things and makes products”, i.e., the same sources that the world emissions crusaders are trying to replace with renewable electricity. Could it be that climate activists are completely oblivious that wind turbines and solar panels cannot produce any of the 6,000 products we get from fossil fuels that are the basis of our lifestyles?
We’re constantly reading in the paper that Greta Thunberg needs to sail to international climate activism events as she refuses to fly jet planes to her destinations, but what does she suggest for alternative modes of transportation for the 4.1 billion passengers in 2017 that the airlines transported around the world? I wonder if Greta is spending so much time sailing around the world that she’ll be a high school dropout statistic and become unemployable?
Sure, the politicians and bureaucrats in the developed countries care about climate change—because they expect a piece of the $100 billion-a-year pie of Western “reparations” the Paris agreement promises them. Concurrently, they also express no concern for the world’s poorest.
In their minds, climate change/global warming activism is only a “first world” problem.
It’s almost impossible to understand that almost half the world— over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. At least 80% of all humanity lives on less than $10 a day. Today, across southern Asia, portions of Europe and parts of Africa and Australia, there are families attempting to live on virtually nothing. As hard as it is to believe it is a truism.
For those Western politicians, entertainers, and other elites who think climate change is the biggest threat facing mankind, they need to take responsibility and begin to imagine the future atrocities to most of the current world population of 7.7 billion that’s projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100. Most of the poor are trying to live in abject poverty but dying by the millions every year.
We’ve had more than 100 years to find an alternative or generic to fossil fuels and all the products we get from them, but have only come up with industrial electricity that can be generated intermittently from sunshine and wind, but yet to find a replacement for the source of those thousands of products that are now the standard for our lifestyles.
Over the last 100 years, climate-related deaths in developed countries have decreased by ninety-five percent, mostly from fossil fuels, has lifted more than a billion people out of poverty in just the past twenty-five years.” We can thank fossil fuels and capitalism for that and more.
The economies in developed countries continue to fund climate activism that will keep third world countries in abominable conditions and prevent them from joining the industrial revolution.
If we continue to deny the growing poor population the benefits of medicines, heating and countless other developments made possible by deep earth minerals and fuels, to ever achieve the lifestyle benefits afforded the climate activists, then we need to justify our reasoning for allowing those millions of preventable deaths from occurring every year in third world countries.
This piece first appeared on CFACT.ORG.
Ronald Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
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