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The Western mind seems sometimes to forget how impoverished many parts of the world still are. Electricity, a ubiquitous source of energy in the developed world, remains a luxury for billions of people who weren't lucky enough to be born in the U.S. or Germany in the 21st century. Energy use per person would have to grow by a factor of 10 in Africa to reach the levels it was at in Germany in 1965, which is why billions of people cook for their families by burning animal dung. That practice causes extremely unhealthy air pollution and CO2 emissions, but for many, the only alternative to starvation.
You wouldn't know it from how rich Westerners talk about their environmental goals, trying to ban gas stoves thanks to flimsy evidence of supposed health risks, when in fact, the world needs more gas stoves.
We are often told that the climate crisis will be the main cause for future food shortages and a global upsurge in migration streams. But the truth is these crisis are more likely to be caused by climate policies than by climate change.
For example, the World Bank has announced a major initiative to electrify Africa with renewables—a notoriously unreliable and intermittent source of electricity—while simultaneously refusing to support the use of nuclear energy, the most reliable form of electricity production. This matters, on many fronts.
In his most recent book, Bjorn Lomborg demonstrates that a tablet with learning software used for one hour a day could triple the learning outcomes of underfunded and understaffed schools in the poorer parts of the world. Yet without reliable electricity and access to the internet, this will be impossible to achieve. In 2025, a fifth of the world's electricity will be used by the internet and the infrastructure needed to maintain it, yet these calculations do not fully factor in getting Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia "online," which means any meaningful developmental policy must assume a much steeper increase in the need for energy.
This need will not be satisfied by renewables, and while bored Western millionaires celebrate global underinvestment in oil and gas projects, it is the developing world that has to pay the price.
Don't believe me? When the energy crisis of 2022 revealed that the end of fossil fuels is nowhere near, countries like Germany bought up every morsel of energy at any price in the global markets (while simultaneously firing up the coal power plants) and outbid countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, causing blackouts, riots, and misery for the latter two.
A similar thing happened in Sri Lanka, a country that wanted to ingrain itself with Western elites by adopting purely organic farming methods and banning artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Within a year, a country that was once self-sufficient in its rice production could no longer feed its own population, forcing the government to import food at eye-watering prices and, as always, hurting the poor the most.
It's surprising that a movement led by Greta Thunberg, who constantly talks about "colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North," remains utterly silent on the slow-motion genocide that the global South will experience if starved of technology and the energy it needs.
Africa holds 65 percent of the world's remaining uncultivated arable land, which would be enough to feed 9 billion people by 2050. This means that under the right conditions, Africa alone could potentially feed not only itself but the world's population, which is assumed to peak at 9.7 billion in 2050.
Yet none of this seems to interest narcissistic Western environmentalists who continue to promote the absurd claim that adaptation to a changing climate is impossible for the poorest regions of the world, and the only solution is to stop economic growth in the North and mass migration from the South.
Nothing could be further from the truth: The global economy is not a zero-sum game, and the voluntary impoverishing of the West will not help the rest of the world. In order to prosper, Africa needs export markets in Europe just as China needed an export market in the U.S. The recession in Europe is already causing economic decline in Sub-Saharan Africa, which will cause more migration than the changing climate.
As Roger Pielke as correctly pointed out, the idea that there is a perfect temperature range in which human beings can prosper is playing footsie with racism. "Raising the specter of climate-caused mass migration, explicitly characterized as black and brown people coming your way, is a form of climate advocacy dressed up as science that traffics in nationalist and even racist impulses," writes Pielke.
Worse, environmental extremism threatens the very lives of billions of Black and brown people who deserve to enjoy the benefits of modernity that we take for granted.
Human beings can adapt to all kinds of climate conditions if given the necessary resources, with energy being the most important among them. Cooking, cooling, heating, artificial fertilizers, genetically modified crops like Golden Rice to address vitamin deficiencies: All of these are available and could ensure a prosperous life for the billions of poor on this planet.
Yet it is the self-righteous environmentalists who try to sabotage this development wherever they can. At some point, we have to ask who the real racists are.
Ralph Schoellhammer is an assistant professor in economics and political science at Webster University Vienna.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
