Climate alarmists are hypocritically proclaiming climate change is founded on racist practices. Under this theory, the sun, our galaxy, and their creator are racist, since they have driven climate change throughout history.
Racism has historically been a factor in many decisions about education, land use, zoning, and many other aspects of our lives, but this began long before Europeans made landfall in the new world. Tribalism, the most fundamental form of racism historically, has existed from time immemorial.
‘Domain of Environmental Alarmists’
Recent racism is a prime domain of environmental alarmists, and a direct outgrowth of centuries of patronizing colonialism. Many climate alarmists argue today’s poor and indigenous people must be “guided” into a “green” tomorrow and not allowed to use the fossil fuels industrialized nations have employed to grow, create wealth, improve living standards, and remain free. Often these same people seem okay with the fact their “solutions” to “climate change” harm billions of people worldwide by leaving them in abject poverty, lacking electricity and clean water. Their lives are far removed from the privileges of eco-elites, who are more concerned about the indirect impacts of climate change on future generations than saving real lives today.
Instead of recognizing their own role in sustaining energy poverty (and its resultant misery, disease, and death), climate alarmists berate the West for escaping generational poverty through technology. Penn State meteorologist Gregory Jenkins has linked racism to climate change “because it dictates who benefits from activities that produce planet-warming gases and who suffers most from the consequences.” Their “solution” is to deny poor people around the world access to fossil fuels and the blessings their use can bring.
Fifteen years ago, Cameroonian journalist Jean-Claude Shanda Tomme said environmentalists “still believe us to be like children that they must save, as if we don’t realize ourselves what the source of our problems is.” Incredibly, this remains a prevailing attitude.
‘Eco-Imperialism’
Nearly two decades ago, in his seminal book Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, Paul Driessen exposed the racist origins of European and American nongovernmental organizations, banking institutions, and government’s eco-colonialist, anti-modernity agenda.
In its introduction, Congress Of Racial Equality National Spokesman Niger Innis said the green elites’ policies “prevent needy nations from using the very technologies that developed countries employed to become rich, comfortable, and free of disease. And they send millions of infants, children, men and women to early graves every year.”
Eco-elites insist Africans not be allowed to combat malaria with DDT, which eradicated malaria throughout the developed world. And they pressure Africans to not use their abundant coal, hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear or oil resources, the same technologies and resources that enriched modern civilizations.
Multiple voices have demanded the West stop smothering Africans with money that fuels massive corruption. A decade ago, in reviewing Dambisa Moyo’s brilliant 2009 book, Dead Aid, I recalled her litany of “sins of aid with strings.” It fuels corruption, encourages inflation, increases debt loads, kills exports, causes civil unrest, frustrates entrepreneurship, and disenfranchises citizens. In effect, foreign aid is also racist.
OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo pleaded with Western leaders that “energy is fundamental for economic development and social progress. While the use of all forms of energy is welcome, it is clear that fossil fuels will continue to satisfy the lion’s share of the world’s growing energy needs for decades to come.” But Africans are still routinely denied financing to develop those resources for their own citizens. This is racism at its worst.
Recently, a World Bank Development Research Group proposed building a 100,000-kilometer African highway system to connect all major African capitals and large cities. It would cost just $30 billion, plus $2 billion a year in maintenance, in the process generating $750 billion a year in overland trade among African nations. In an act of pure racism, environmentalists within the World Bank and other development organizations successfully lobbied to shelve it.
Green-Racism Continues Post-COVID-19
And so the green racism continues. African Energy Chamber Executive Chairman N.J. Ayuk recently criticized the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and International Energy Agency (IEA) for describing low oil prices caused by the COVID-19 pandemic as “golden opportunity” for governments to phase out fossil fuels support– and thus better living standards.
“The OECD and IEA don’t necessarily know what’s best for the people who live on this planet,” wrote Ayuk in a syndicated article released by the African Energy Chamber. “Pressuring governments to stop supporting fossil fuels certainly would not be good for the African oil and gas companies or entrepreneurs striving to build a better future.
“And it could be downright harmful to communities looking at gas-to-power initiatives to bring them reliable electricity,” Ayuk wrote. “Too often the discussion about climate change – and the call to leave fossil fuels in the ground – is largely a Western narrative [that] does not factor in the needs of low-income Africans who could reap the many benefits of a strategic approach to oil and gas operations in Africa: Reduced energy poverty, job creation, and entrepreneurship opportunities, to name a few.”
On the global stage, Ayuk concluded, the OECD and the IEA are “dismissing the voices of many Africans who want and need the continent’s oil and gas industry to thrive.” In short, elitist global power brokers ignore the voices of the world’s most needy.
Firewood Not Gas for Thee
Despite abundant rivers, sunlight, and oil, gas, coal, and uranium reserves, in a report for the Global Warming Policy Forum, journalist Geoff Hill details how many Africans still rely on increasingly scarce firewood to cook and heat their homes on cold nights, stripping forest habitats and decimating wildlife habitats in the process. Of the world’s 50 countries with the least access to electricity, 41 are in Africa.
Nigerian neurosurgeon Dr. Sylvanus Ayeni’s 2017 book Rescue Thyself exposes how the corrupt African governments have failed to serve their people. He is saddened that, despite over a trillion dollars in aid to Africa from the United States alone, so much has been blown on palaces, private jets, and outright theft.
But who empowered these greedy leaders, who sought to do what donors wanted? Will the West finally acknowledge their paternalistic racism that empowered this corruption? Or will it just continue the eugenic practices that dehumanized Africans as “unfit” to advance, under the guise of fighting climate change?
Duggan Flanakin (dflanakin@gmail.com) writes from Austin, Texas.
[Originally posted on Townhall]
