Global Warming Fanatics
April 12, 2007
Maintaining Third World poverty
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's professed concern for the world's poor in its latest hysterical report on global warming is utter hypocrisy.
Nothing will keep the Third World poorer than denying it access to reliable, affordable electricity -- the practical impact of IPCC policies, parroted by Kyoto accord fanatics.
Consider the irony. Affluent, First World politicians, UN bureaucrats, government-funded scientists and "environmentalists," having decreed the countries they live in have irresponsibly heated up the planet by burning fossil fuels, now presume to tell the Third World, in effect, "oops -- we screwed up and not only will you pay for it through increasingly severe weather, but you can never aspire to our standard of living, to what we have."
That's the thinking behind Kyoto, which will arbitrarily transfer billions of dollars of wealth from the First World to the Third as reparations for man-made global warming, while, incredibly, doing next to nothing to alleviate the root causes of poverty, disease and low life expectancy.
Third World countries not run by totally corrupt leaders -- in those cases, dictators and their armies will get most of our Kyoto cash, as they now do with foreign aid -- are desperately trying to improve the standard of living of their citizens. That's why China's building hundreds of coal-fired (and greenhouse gas emitting) energy plants. That's why Africa desperately wants to develop its fossil fuel reserves.
It's not because they hate the environment, it's because they know affordable, reliable energy -- not handouts from the West -- is the key to permanently improving living standards in the Third World, where two billion people, one-third of the world's population, lack access to electricity, resulting in poverty, disease, hunger, low productivity and premature death.
But well-fed, First World, Kyoto fanatics, awash is their naive, pastoral fantasies, don't want the Third World building coal, oil or natural gas-fired energy plants to supply electricity. They also object to nuclear power, which emits no greenhouse gases. They would deny the Third World any realistic means of modernizing itself. Instead, they insanely demonize industrialization and development, the only things that can lift poor nations out of poverty, while lecturing the world's poorest to use wind and solar power, a farce given how impractical and expensive this would be.
Meanwhile, the IPCC and its cheerleaders give us ever-more-hysterical "climate porn" updates -- theoretical predictions of the additional deaths that may occur due to man-made global warming, that ignore the real deaths happening right now because of the Third World's lack of electricity.
Here's African economist and author James Shikwati, interviewed by Channel 4 in Great Britain for its documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle: "One clear thing that emerges from the whole environmental debate is the point that somebody came to kill the African dream, and the African dream is to develop. We are being told 'don't touch your resources. Don't touch your oil. Don't touch your coal.' That is suicide."
Kyoto exempts developing nations from emission cuts up to 2012. The idea was the First World would set the example, then get the Third World to follow suit post-2012. Some example.
Many developed countries, including Canada, have spectacularly failed to meet their emission targets.
Now we're going to tell the world's poorest they must not aspire to what we have, to satisfy our latest, hysterical, trendy environmental crusade? Right. Who the hell do we think we are?
Maintaining Third World poverty
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's professed concern for the world's poor in its latest hysterical report on global warming is utter hypocrisy.
Nothing will keep the Third World poorer than denying it access to reliable, affordable electricity -- the practical impact of IPCC policies, parroted by Kyoto accord fanatics.
Consider the irony. Affluent, First World politicians, UN bureaucrats, government-funded scientists and "environmentalists," having decreed the countries they live in have irresponsibly heated up the planet by burning fossil fuels, now presume to tell the Third World, in effect, "oops -- we screwed up and not only will you pay for it through increasingly severe weather, but you can never aspire to our standard of living, to what we have."
That's the thinking behind Kyoto, which will arbitrarily transfer billions of dollars of wealth from the First World to the Third as reparations for man-made global warming, while, incredibly, doing next to nothing to alleviate the root causes of poverty, disease and low life expectancy.
Third World countries not run by totally corrupt leaders -- in those cases, dictators and their armies will get most of our Kyoto cash, as they now do with foreign aid -- are desperately trying to improve the standard of living of their citizens. That's why China's building hundreds of coal-fired (and greenhouse gas emitting) energy plants. That's why Africa desperately wants to develop its fossil fuel reserves.
It's not because they hate the environment, it's because they know affordable, reliable energy -- not handouts from the West -- is the key to permanently improving living standards in the Third World, where two billion people, one-third of the world's population, lack access to electricity, resulting in poverty, disease, hunger, low productivity and premature death.
But well-fed, First World, Kyoto fanatics, awash is their naive, pastoral fantasies, don't want the Third World building coal, oil or natural gas-fired energy plants to supply electricity. They also object to nuclear power, which emits no greenhouse gases. They would deny the Third World any realistic means of modernizing itself. Instead, they insanely demonize industrialization and development, the only things that can lift poor nations out of poverty, while lecturing the world's poorest to use wind and solar power, a farce given how impractical and expensive this would be.
Meanwhile, the IPCC and its cheerleaders give us ever-more-hysterical "climate porn" updates -- theoretical predictions of the additional deaths that may occur due to man-made global warming, that ignore the real deaths happening right now because of the Third World's lack of electricity.
Here's African economist and author James Shikwati, interviewed by Channel 4 in Great Britain for its documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle: "One clear thing that emerges from the whole environmental debate is the point that somebody came to kill the African dream, and the African dream is to develop. We are being told 'don't touch your resources. Don't touch your oil. Don't touch your coal.' That is suicide."
Kyoto exempts developing nations from emission cuts up to 2012. The idea was the First World would set the example, then get the Third World to follow suit post-2012. Some example.
Many developed countries, including Canada, have spectacularly failed to meet their emission targets.
Now we're going to tell the world's poorest they must not aspire to what we have, to satisfy our latest, hysterical, trendy environmental crusade? Right. Who the hell do we think we are?
posted by Gerry Surtees at Friday, April 13, 2007
0 comments
