Trump’s words are far less despicable than what Green-Democrat policies do to people
By Paul Driessen
By now, nearly the entire world has heard reports that President Trump referred to the origins of some immigrants as “sh**hole countries.”
Democrats and their media allies spent an entire week castigating the president, calling him racist for using the salty language of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Their faux outrage served to distract people from the ways Mr. Trump’s energy, deregulation and tax reform policies have rocketed the stock market to record highs a record number of times, created over two million jobs, slashed black and Hispanic unemployment, and increased US wealth by some $8 trillion since his inauguration. Pounding on this bad-word Fake News story also muddied discussions about immigration, which Dems hope will bring big electoral gains in November. As former Obama aide Jennifer Palmieri recently put it, illegal immigrants are “a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.”
Mr. Obama himself waded in, saying Trump supporters and other Fox News viewers live “on a different planet” than people who watch “mainstream media.” In this era of hyper-partisan news coverage and political views, he’s absolutely right. You might call that other planet the Real World, inhabited by hard-working blue collar folks … and struggling families overseas. Which brings us to the real issue.
The naughty-word firestorm also distracts people from the Democrats’ own racial history and animus. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln ended slavery and championed civil rights in the 1960s, while the Democrats were the party of slavery, the KKK, segregation, and policies that even today condemn too many minority children to failed schools, fatherless homes and crime-ridden cities. Especially under President Obama, their unending war on fossil fuels hampered economic development and job creation, and brought poor, minority, middle class and blue collar family living standards down a couple notches.
Far worse is what the modern Democratic Party and its allies in the media, radical environmentalist movement and global government agencies are doing to the world’s most impoverished, malnourished, diseased, energy-deprived, politically powerless families. They do it in the name of environmental protection, sustainable development or preventing “dangerous manmade climate change.” But the policies are callous, unjust, dehumanizing, eco-imperialistic and often lethal. Some would even call them racist.
In 2009, President Obama told Africans they should refrain from using “dirty” fossil fuels and focus instead on their “bountiful” wind, solar, geothermal and biofuel energy. In 2013, he told another African audience that global warming constitutes “the biggest challenge we have environmentally,” greater than all other environmental calamities like “dirty water, dirty air.”
“If everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house,” he continued, “the planet will boil over.” He then announced his “Power Africa” initiative for a “sustainable Africa” – which emphasized wind, solar, biofuel and geothermal power … but didn’t even mention fossil fuels.
His Overseas Private Investment Corporation refused to support construction of a gas-fired power plant in Ghana that would provide clean and affordable electricity to that power-deprived nation – using natural gas that companies were flaring (burning and wasting) in Ghanaian oil fields. His administration ignored South Africa’s request for a World Bank loan to continue building its state-of-the-art, coal-fired Medupi power plant. Europe’s former colonialist powers had the same attitudes toward their former colonies.
Thankfully, both projects eventually got the necessary funding and were completed.
Continued energy poverty condemns the world’s poor “to real poverty and the diseases, malnutrition and desperation that go with that absence of modern energy,” said Ugandan Steven Lyazi, who died recently in a tragic accident on a horrid African road that is also a product of pervasive poverty. These problems are due to dysfunctional government and incompetent, corrupt leaders, but also to “callous, imperialistic
people in rich countries” who use exaggerated or imaginary environmental concerns and fake disasters “to limit how much poor countries may use fossil fuels (or nuclear power) to develop their economies.”
“The principal and unchanged interest” of poor countries continues to be “development and a better quality of life for [their] people,” says Pakistani academic Adil Najam: health, nutrition, jobs, education and life spans. Their principal fear is that the industrialized world is “using environmental issues as an excuse to pull up the development ladder behind it.”
“The greatest threat to the alleviation of the structural poverty of the Third World is the continuing campaign by Western governments, egged on by some climate scientists and green activists, to curb greenhouse emissions, primarily the CO2 from burning fossil fuels,” writes economist Deepak Lal. (He also wrote the foreword to the India edition of my book, Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.)
The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health now claims the Third World is suffering millions of deaths annually from industrial pollution. This is false, says Professor Mikko Paunio. Most of the deaths the commission attributes to industrial air pollution are actually caused by burning wood and dung. Most deaths from diarrhea are no longer caused by polluted water, as it claims, but from poor hygiene because the world’s poor still do not have enough water for proper bathing, cleaning and hygiene.
For the developing world, says Paunio, “adequate water supply has completely fallen off the agenda. Instead, environmental health for poorer countries has come to mean only provision of some clean drinking water and latrines. But the copious supplies of clean water that allow hygienic conditions – and therefore public health – are no longer seen as a priority for the world’s poorest.”
That’s largely because abundant clean water requires abundant, reliable, affordable electricity – which requires large centralized coal, natural gas, nuclear or hydroelectric generators … which Greens oppose. As to renewable energy, ultra-green Germany’s millions of solar panels received just ten hours of (weak) sunshine during the entire 31 days of December 2017! Try running a country or water system on that. The same radical groups that battle energy also oppose DDT and insecticides to control malaria and other insect-borne diseases. They condemn and obstruct GMO food – even crops created to replace staples that are being decimated by disease, and even Golden Rice, the genetically engineered miracle grain that could end childhood Vitamin A Deficiency and the blindness and slow death that accompany it.
The undeniable result of all these campaigns is that the world’s most destitute people are kept where they are, or allowed to improve their lives only a little, at the margins, to the extent possible with inadequate renewable energy, clean water, bed nets and subsistence farming. That these impacts fall most heavily on the world’s non-white families underscores the racial injustice of so many environmentalist policies.
Like their ancient forebears, today’s superstitious Gaia worshipers sacrifice people to prevent droughts, global warming and climate change. They protect impoverished families from computer-generated climate disasters decades from now – by shortening their lives today. The lesson is simple.
Poor countries should not do what rich countries are doing now that they are rich. They should do what rich countries did to become rich – using the best modern technologies available.
China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and other countries are doing exactly that. They are tired of being told not to develop, because it “might hurt the climate” or “wouldn’t be sustainable.” They’re building hydroelectric dams and coal- and gas-fired power plants at a rapid pace – often with the aid of Chinese loans, expertise and technology, because western nations have abdicated their responsibilities.
So yes, there is another planet besides the one where Mr. Obama and his likeminded friends reside. It’s a world where people are tired of kowtowing to ruling elites who live in luxury while telling “commoners” they must roll back their living standards, or never aspire to conditions much better than they have now.
But in a few more years or decades, today’s poor countries will reach economic parity with rich nations – and even surge ahead of those that sacrifice their industries and “commoners” on the Earth goddess altar.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of books and articles on energy, environment and human rights issues
