We just had our 57th Earth Day, and our planet’s poorest people were ignored yet again
Another Earth Day has come and gone – number 57, like Heinz steak sauce. Once again, the media, activists and international agencies fed us pablum, exaggeration and alarmism.
Our public lands, the Endangered Species Act, biodiversity and environmental justice are under threat, they raged. Oceans are filling with plastic waste. Big polluting corporations are getting away with “climate homicide” and “planetary ecocide.” The Arctic is melting, and polar bear cubs are drowning.
The United Nations took a short break from bashing Israel over “Palestinian genocide” and Western nations for the “gravest crime” ever committed against humanity (trans-Atlantic slavery), to proclaim April 22 “International Mother Earth Day” and call for an end to “crimes” that “disrupt biodiversity.”
Activists held the “first multilateral conference” on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. Their “Our Power, Our Planet” theme says further progress will require that communities and individuals pressure governments to accelerate the “clean” energy transition from “dirty” fossil fuels.
Forgive my skepticism. But I was a college organizer for the very first Earth Day (1970), back when we had real, highly visible environmental problems: air pollution and toxic smog over cities, industrial water pollution that made it unsafe to swim, leaded gasoline, and more. We largely solved those problems.
Since then, greens have grown in domestic and foreign financing, power and influence, and the ability to conduct ideological campaigns and lawfare on issues of irrelevance to the vast majority of Americans, let alone families in the most energy-deprived, destitute, diseased and malnourished nations on our planet.
And yet, for days leading up to Earth Day and afterward, virtually nothing was said by the UN, WHO, eco-activists, media screed-meisters or I-care-deeply politicians about these people … or even about people in their own developed countries who bear the brunt of climate-centric, anti-growth, net-zero, de-industrialization, lower-living-standards policies.
It’s as if people don’t exist, and don’t belong on our planet. The herd must be culled.
In the developed world, most climate-focused countries and states have the most pseudo-clean energy mandates and subsidies … the highest electricity prices … the highest prices for goods and services. They’re destroying entire industries, leaving thousands unemployed. They have the technologies to utilize their abundant carbon and nuclear energy, but the ruling elites don’t want citizens to enjoy jobs and living standards based on that energy. Each year, thousands die needlessly during frigid winters and summer heatwaves because families cannot afford or obtain proper heating and air conditioning.
The “climate crisis” is a Hollywood special effects disaster movie. The foundation for any “clean” energy transition is imaginary. Utopian energy is simply not clean, green, renewable or sustainable.
When wind turbines, solar panels, transformers, transmission lines and backup batteries or power plants are included, wind and solar energy require dozens of times more raw materials (and thus mining and pollution) and hundreds of times more land than just building a few nuclear or combined-cycle gas plants close to where electricity is needed – and forgetting about any pseudo-renewable systems.
For families in poor nations, the price tag is infinitely higher.
Worldwide, 730 million people still have no access to electricity. Billions more have minimal, sporadic access. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 600 million people have no electricity; hundreds of millions more have minimal, unpredictable electricity from small wind turbines and solar panels here and there. The situation in much of rural Asia and Latin America is little better. Ditto for vehicles and gasoline.
The result is entirely predictable. Almost no wage-earning jobs or mechanized farming, but abundant backbreaking work for parents and children in fields – and plenty of malnutrition, disease and death.
Over half the world’s people (more than four billion) still subsist on $10 a day.
More than 260 million people suffer from critical food insecurity and malnutrition, and 35 million children are acutely malnourished, including 10 million with childhood wasting disease – leaving them with weak immune systems and vulnerable to developmental delays, disease and death
Malaria still infects 280 million people annually and kills 610,000. Indoor air pollution from wood, dung, coal and kerosene cooking and heating fires kills nearly 3 million people globally every year. Up to 3.5 million – mostly children – die annually due to inadequate safe water, sanitation and hygiene. Diseases in modern western societies never even hear about sicken, disable or kill millions more.
Do you think any of their grieving families give a spotted owl hoot that your local temperature climbed a degree since the Little Ice Age ended, or a polar bear cub drowned halfway around the world?
A major reason is rampant corruption. The World Bank found that at least 7.5 percent (and as much as 15 percent or more) of total assistance to the most aid-dependent nations ends up in ruling elites’ foreign bank accounts. And yet the WB’s International Development Association received $94 billion for the 2022-2025 period. Multilateral development bank financing to top humanitarian recipients was $12 billion in 2020. Total worldwide Official Development Assistance reached a record $161.2 billion in 2020. Do the math.
Far worse, these banks, US and European foundations, and climate, agricultural and other activist groups work tirelessly to prevent these countries from acquiring or developing the electricity and other energy they need to emerge from squalor, starvation and disease. For decades, these virtue-signaling banks have provided loans only for wind and solar projects – almost never for coal or gas power plants.
The result? Expensive, limited, unreliable electricity. No modern hospitals, schools, water purification, factories or shops. Continued pollution from wood and dung fuels. No jobs, improved living standards or reductions in killer diseases.
The same institutions – along with the UN and other government agencies – oppose pesticides for eradicating locusts and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. They wage campaigns against biotech corn, soybeans, canola, and even hybrid seeds and life-saving Golden Rice. They pressure African governments to ban non-organic fertilizers and crop-saving pesticides that have been approved as safe in wealthy countries. Many even oppose tractors and other mechanized equipment.
To them, the only acceptable farming method is “agro-ecology” – la Via Campesina: the Peasant Way – aka, “traditional,” “organic,” backbreaking subsistence farming.
This, corruption, wars and food-deprivation as a weapon of war is why we still have malnutrition, starvation, disease and astronomical death tolls in African and other impoverished countries.
These global zealots want power over poor countries – not power for the countries’ destitute and desperate people. Their morally depraved policies and practices bring death to millions every year.
Developing countries should avoid doing what rich nations are doing now that they are rich. Instead, they should do what rich nations did to become rich. They should remember that wealthy industrialized countries did not have MDBs to help them; they created institutions to finance the power generation and factories that created jobs, middle classes, health, prosperity, new industries … and taxes to pay for more.
They must chart their own destiny – and take their rightful places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. Decent, moral Westerners must help them end the corruption and make this happen.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books, reports and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.