In theory, Leftists want poor countries to have a greater say in international affairs. In practice, they don’t much like it when it happens.
At the Paris climate summit, representatives of the industrialized world have been frustrated by the refusal of their more southerly colleagues to play their allotted roles.
They don’t mind being excoriated by the likes of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Bolivia’s Evo Morales. On the contrary, they tend to go along with the anti-colonialist belief that most of the world’s problems are caused by capitalism.
No, what really bothers them is the courteous but determined refusal of states like India and China to sabotage their economic development. Decarbonization, say these countries, is all well and good, but they have more immediate priorities, such as lifting hundreds of millions of their citizens out of crushing poverty. And the surest route out of poverty is through cheaper energy, which increases productivity, lowers living costs and makes everyone better off.
According to a group called Paris Climate Justice, global warming is “an issue of survival, especially for marginalized peoples: poor women, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, pensioners, urban slum dwellers, and rural communities.” In reality, these are precisely the people suffering now from destitution — the people who stand to lose the most from carbon restrictions.
Think, for a moment, what your life would be like without electricity. Think what it would mean to wash all your clothes by hand, a process which leaves village women stooped in early middle age after years of bending their backs over plastic tubs. Think of the ironing: grabbing blocks of metal out of a hearth with a padded cloth, your hand becoming more scarred each time. Think what it means to have no toilets. No politician will want to delay the electrification that can transform their villages.
This is not to say that the leaders of developing countries are uninterested in the environment: Living, as they do, in smog-wreathed cities, they have more incentive than anyone to clean up their emissions. Nor does it mean that they are “climate change deniers” — an especially asinine phrase when no one is positing climate stasis.
All they are asking is that we allocate resources rationally. If the world is heating as a result of human activity, there are different ways to respond. We can spend a great deal of money on trying to slow that process; or we can spend a much smaller sum on adaptation. Human beings are very good at adaptation. Mean annual temperature in Helsinki is 5.6 degrees centigrade (42.08 degrees Fahrenheit), in Athens 17.4 degrees (63.32 degrees Fahrenheit), in Rio de Janeiro 26.6 (79.88 degrees Fahrenheit), yet all three cities are capable of supporting large populations.
Of course, such talk is heresy to the sacerdotal figures who tend to the Rio-Kyoto-Copenhagen-Paris agenda. They want to frame the choice in apocalyptic language, not as a debate about the optimization of resources and about whether some measures might be sensibly deferred until our technologies are more advanced. Those who might die in the future because of climate change are prioritized over those dying now from indoor fires, water-borne diseases and malnutrition.
Why? Because, deep down, the people demanding the end of fossil fuels don’t see an economic slowdown as a regrettable side effect of their agenda; they see it as a secondary aim. They have never liked free-market capitalism and the “materialism” they associate with it. “Giving society cheap, abundant energy,” wrote Paul Ehrlich, the prophet of the environmentalist movement, in 1976, “would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” It’s not green growth these chaps want; it’s less growth.
Which is why they’re getting so impatient with the uppity Indians and Africans. These countries refuse to remain poor, passive and properly grateful. They are discovering the benefits of capitalism. Instead of being snobbish about “greed” and “putting profits before people,” they understand that such phrases are ugly names that Westerners give the miracle which is unfolding in their rural areas – a miracle which is giving their peoples mobile phones and vaccinations and running water and cars and literacy.
And what is driving that miracle? Precisely the same thing that lifted our own ancestors out of similar penury: cheap fossil fuels.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
