conspiracy theory: save the world from global warming by keeping Africa poor

I have seen this pointed out elsewhere: The idea that raising prices for oil and other forms of energy lead to increased poverty.

the right wing conspiracy site Gateway pundit links to an article where Magette Wade lays out the details.

  

Wade highlights the hypocrisy of climate activists dictating restrictive energy policies from comfortable offices in Paris, London, and New York—policies that spur development in countries that haven't even had the chance to grow. “Africa remains poor because it lacks access to energy,” she explains. No energy means no industry. And no industry means no independence.

Most troubling, according to Wade, is that this system is enabled by African leaders themselves. “Why do the leaders of Senegal or Africa allow this to happen? For the same reason they allowed foreign aid to be the only relationship we had with the West,” she says. It’s a silent deal: African governments accept these imposed conditions and receive money, political favors, and international legitimacy—without ever being accountable to their people. The latest form of this control is called “climate aid.”  

A perverse twist on cooperation, climate aid tells African nations: “Don’t develop your own resources. Don’t use fossil fuels. And we’ll give you money.” But that money doesn’t create jobs or industry. It only finances bureaucracies and deepens dependency.  

 

 environmentalism is a two edged sword: as we see in the Philppines, the emphasis on organic farming (which is our business by the way) leads to healthier food, but it does mean a lower harvest and higher food prices. So they have to import food for the poor in the slums of Manila.

And stopping mining, which destroyed the environment because the mines were not forced to clean up their garbage, actually led to mom and pop mines, which were not reggulated at all and more prone to accidents and envirnomnetal destruction. Ditto for forestry: Stopping legal ways to harvest trees led to illegal cutting of trees (all it takes is a bribe to local authorities).

I suspect a similar problem in Africa, where those educated in the western mindset of environmentalism are unable or unwilling to see the big picture.

Stopping the desert

 Atlas Obscura has an article on projects in Senegal that are hoping to stop the spread of the desert along the southern edge of the Sahara.

LINK

The garden is the latest iteration of the pro

ject known as The Great Green Wall, first envisioned as a viridescent belt squiggling thousands of miles across the Sahel region, from Senegal to Djibouti. Launched in 2007 by the African Union with backing from the European Union, World Bank, and the United Nations, the project was initially meant to help stave off desertification by stymying the Sahara as it wandered south. ... The drivers of desertification include climate variability and climate change, overgrazing, the construction of river dams, and conflicts that displace people and spur shifts in land use. Long droughts can leave fertile soil vulnerable, and winds and rains can whisk it away. “Deforestation can accelerate the process, because trees serve as windbreaks,” Okolie says. That’s where the Great Green Wall concept came in. The initial plan emphasized trees as an anchor for soil and a buffer against the encroaching sand. Some elements of the idea made sense, says Geert Sterk, a geoscientist at Utrecht University who studies land degradation. “Tree and shrub roots hold soil, [and] the canopies trap raindrops before reaching the soil surface and reduce strong winds,” curbing erosion by wind and the region’s relatively rare but fierce rain,

............

it is not just a problem in Africa: China worries about the Gobi.

 

Development in Haiti

I wrote about the cultural problems in Haiti that made development impossible...alas, many of the problems are now in Zim, with government terror groups and the most productive leaving the country.

Part of the essay:

What does one do with a country like Haiti, where years of occupation, corruption, and many different types of aid from outside hasn’t worked?

Lots of “it’s your fault” type stuff all over the internet: a lot of it uses the left wing’s meme of “Blame America” (and the right shouts back “Blame France”). Not mentioned, except by Pat Robertson, is the devil. Actually, he is crazy, but he did point out a problem few talk about: The problem of Haitian government officials using pacts with the devil and voodoo inspired gangs to terrorize the locals. The function of the UN peacekeepers in that country are to try to stop these criminal gangs from terroizing the population (The Philippines has almost 100 peacekeepers there).

Not mentioned either, except by Danny Glover,the revenge of Gaia. Again, he is crazy, but his comments allowed some people to point out how the destruction of the environment, mainly by poor peasants who destroyed forests in order to eck out a meagre living, contributes to poverty in that country.

Part of the problem is cultural, but again no one wants to say: In some African cultures, when things are terrible, you just cope. In the west, this would be called passivity, but piety and passivity is a time proven way to survive in times of chaos (”The Meek will inherit the earth”). Of course, the “flip side” of the coin is rage: That there is a point when things get too bad, and the cultural passivity erupts in riots. In the Philippines, we call this going “amok”; in Africa, many of the most terrible atrocities are a reaction from years of holding in anger at being oppressed.

So how does one “cure” Haiti?

At The African Executive, Carl Lindskoog has an article lamenting how USAID tried to remake Haiti into another “Asian Tiger”, but failed.

From the standpoint of the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Haiti was the perfect candidate for this neoliberal facelift. The entrenched poverty of the Haitian masses could be used to force them into low-paying jobs sewing baseballs and assembling other products.

But USAID had plans for the countryside too. Not only were Haiti’s cities to become exporting bases but so was the countryside, with Haitian agriculture also reshaped along the lines of export-oriented, market-based production.

The result, says Lindskoog, was a flight by country people to the cities, where the expected jobs never developed.

What Lindskoog never mentions is why the factories didn’t develop. And that is the problem of Haiti, and of much of Africa, and of the poorer countries in Asia such as the Philippines and Indonesia.

In a phrase: It’s the corruption, stupid.

It was the corruption of various Haitian governments that spawned the gangs, stole the equipment and put bribes and red tape to stop development. Yes, you can blame “Western capitalism” for putting up with these government leaders, but this is easy. The problem is: What is the alternative?

Sustainable development, say the utopians. Ah, but if you actually live in these places, it means there is no one solution: There are many solutions, all of which may need to be done for different social problems.

The answer is to encourage some migration to the cities, while providing small loans, and modern seed/fertilizer and agricultural techniques to encourage farmers to remain on the land. But this means allowing roads and modern transportation, so that they can get their goods to market.

Alas, a lot of folks oppose capitalism and see the flight to the cities as the wrong answer, without realizing the hardship of living in those picturesque villages so beloved of the National Geographic. Village life has it’s own good points and problems, but unless you are crass enough to be like “Papa Doc Duvalier” and ignore a high childhood mortality as a way to keep population growth low, what is the alternative?

One alternative is seen in Haiti, where the population using primitive farming methods in rural areas has destroyed the environment.

Another is much of the third world, where peasant migration to the cities is overwhelming. This destroys the culture of the villages, but often for those who migrate, it means hope for the children: education, an 8 hour job, no starvation. And with education and health care comes the acceptance of family planning: that now, if you have 4 children, you no longer have to worry that half of them will die.

Which brings us to Avatar, and China.

According to the BBC, the government of China is uneasy about showing the hit film “Avatar” in that country.

Writing in English-language newspaper China Daily, columnist Huang Hung said the smash-hit film mirrored China’s rules on forced eviction.

“All the forced removal of old neighbourhoods in China makes us the only earthlings today who can really feel the pain of the Na’vi,” she wrote.

Yes.

There is pain by those who leave the villages, and there is pain by those who are forced out of villages.

The dirty little secret behind China’s dynamic development.

But again, what is your alternative? Staying in the rural areas and starving?

Change will come, with or without planning.

But please, don’t think the only alternative is an “apartheid” that allows villager to remain like animals in a zoo, pristine and beautiful, so that rich westerners can come and visit them and go home and talk about these people living in the Garden of Eden...