The do-gooders at Global Affairs Canada, which they inexplicably prefer to “Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development” although the latter is the actual name and they are presided over, nominally at least, by a “Foreign Minister” not a “Global Affairs Minister”… but we digress. The point is, they want to end poverty, injustice, gender discrimination and bad weather and are sure they can. Thus in a typical day’s work they went to a fancy conference, ate on an expense account and issued a “Joint statement on protecting progress and renewing resolve: Ending child, early and forced marriage”. So now they want poor countries to develop quickly so they become places where children are protected from forced labour and child marriages? Steady on. They also want poor countries not to develop hydrocarbon energy of the sort that, um, powers schools, creates jobs and opportunity and avoids, for instance, the miserable cycle we encountered in our visit to Senegal precisely to discuss energy poverty, where boys are sent from the villages to big cities where they’re forced to beg under the guise of a “religious education” and girls are kept home to be forced into polygamous marriages with much older men. Still, the Global Affairs do-gooders know lots of smug long words like “Prevention must remain at the centre of our response, particularly for girls facing multiple and intersecting vulnerabilities.” And to address all these problems they gather in New York City not rural Senegal because I mean really dahling.
If the obsession with climate change were merely harmless in its effects it would still be a bad thing because it costs a lot of money. But it’s a lot worse because of how bad many of its effects actually are. Even in wealthy countries the war on oil and gas causes poverty, unemployment and even unrest. In poor countries it causes misery and starvation.
In the Wall Street Journal Indermit Gill and Bjorn Lomborg recently warned of “The Rich World’s Climate Distraction”, noting that there has been a massive increase in human material wellbeing since the Second World War but that:
“over the past decade, much of that progress has stalled. This happened at the same time that the rich world shifted its attention to climate change. This isn’t a coincidence, and it has to change.”
It doesn’t have to. But it should. (As Lomborg keeps saying.) And for actions to change, ideas have to, because as they write of that stall:
“There are many causes, but one stands out. In 2016, the world retired its Millennium Development Goals – a short list of mostly efficient, targeted aims: cut poverty, disease, and maternal and child deaths, and get every child into school. In their place came the Sustainable Development Goals. Climate change became the rich world’s obsession.”
And one among many examples is that:
“in 2025, climate finance from multilateral development banks to low- and middle-income countries topped $103 billion – nearly half of all their financing. The World Bank alone directed 48% of its lending to climate finance.”
As Gill in particular can speak to because he just finished a four-year term as the World Bank’s chief economist. And as they go on to say about the claim that the poor are “more vulnerable to climate change”, the sad truth is that “Poor people are more vulnerable to everything” including, we add, forced marriage. So the best way to make them less vulnerable isn’t to fix the weather. It’s to make them wealthier. Or as they put it:
“Resilience runs through development – not through a solar farm that raises power prices and slows industrialization.”
And energy is crucial because, another of those heart-rending statistics that bounces off the professional do-gooders self-satisfied hearts:
“Much of Africa uses less electricity per person than a single refrigerator in a Western home.”
For everything including industrial production. A great many Africans do not have refrigerators in their homes because they do not have electric power at all. And another thing:
“Tellingly, Africans ranked climate change 31st among 34 priorities in a recent Afrobarometer survey.”
So unless you’re one of those “White Man’s Burden” people who intends to do good to dark-skinned foreigners whether they understand and want it nor not, maybe listen to them.
As that article underlines, the climate obsession has significant effects by the resources it diverts as well as those it destroys. And indeed speaking of Senegal, and Africa more generally, under the heading “Your Weekly Escape” National Geographic brings us the sad, sweet story that “A Lion King animator drew Africa’s last lions for you”. Noooo, we cry. Not its last lions.
We do understand that with lions, as with polar bears, there’s such a thing as “too close”. But surely as that continent finally breaks free of the Soviet model and experiences more rapid growth, or tries to, its inhabitants can preserve enough habitat that there will be room for lions outside Disney studios. And again, as we said in our Senegal documentary, there’s a clear pattern that when poor people begin to experience real economic growth it is initially bad for the environment, because they are finally gaining the ability to exploit resources and are in desperate need of basics. But as they get richer, somewhere around US$5,000 per capita 30 years ago and maybe twice that nominally now, they come to have both the desire and the capacity to protect nature as well, starting with cleaner water and air and moving on to habitat. So “green” policies that are climate-obsessed have the effect of delaying development and therefore despoiling nature including the plains where lions once roamed and “deserve” to roam still.
Speaking of deserving, and girls deserving a better future, the press release in question was also riddled with postmodern verbiage like “Every girl deserves the right to learn, to lead, to make her own choices and to shape her own future.” To which we might retort that if everyone is leading nobody’s following so what’s the point. And it’s more than a bit Promethean to want to “shape your own future” instead of realizing there’s a lot going on in the world, much of it beyond your control. We are also skeptical of politicians, or marketers, using “deserve” to tell us how splendid we are without explaining exactly what we did to deserve such accolades. But suppress such metaphysical speculations and ask only this question: if you believe that, what’s the best route forward?
We ask in part because of the memorable introduction to Charles Murray’s book In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, where as an idealistic young foreign aid worker he realized with something approaching shock that what he and his fellow do-gooders were trying to bestow on the grateful natives was very different from what they actually seemed to want, which was primarily the ability to control their own affairs. Instead Global Affairs aims to:
“* protect and advance global commitments to the rights of women and girls, resisting rollback and strengthening accountability for implementation
* champion sustained political leadership and international cooperation to accelerate progress toward ending child, early and forced marriage
* mobilize resources, partnerships and innovative financing to scale proven solutions and strengthen support for women-led, youth-led, survivor-led and community-based organizations
* turn commitments into action through laws, policies, plans, budgets and services that prevent and respond to child marriage across sectors
*reach the girls most at risk, particularly in humanitarian and crisis settings, and support their meaningful participation and leadership, including girls who are married, pregnant or parenting
* strengthen evidence and accountability to track progress, identify gaps and deliver measurable results for girls”
And give them all degrees in sociology, what?
We are of course firmly against child marriage, forced marriage and many other bad things. But we are also against blundering arrogance, and therefore spend our time and effort trying to devise and implement ways in which people can control their own lives and, what’s that phrase, “shape their own future” instead of being gifted “innovative financing to scale proven solutions” and otherwise empty the thesaurus into hungry mouths. And critical to any such realistic plan is to have the electricity go on in a system you control. Not to have the World Bank finance a solar panel while shutting down the gas rig.
Would like to see an audit done for the meals consumed by our so-called Global Affairs at that fancy conference in NYC.At our expense.Bet the bill was $200 a plate.And that's US dollars.