Fight Climate Change, Ignore the Poor
– By Howard Sierer –
G-20, a group of the planet’s 19 richest nations plus the African Union, released a report calling for an additional $3 trillion per year to be provided to developing nations. Calls for increased foreign aid are commonplace, but this report is noteworthy for how it proposed that the funding should be spent.
The report said around $1.8 trillion should go towards sustainable infrastructure while only $1.2 trillion would be allocated to apparently lower-priority activities like food, health, and education. Climate change activists managed to get the report’s authors to propose increasing the allocation to green energy by a factor of four over the amounts proposed in 2019!
This makes no sense to me, given the realities on the ground in many developing countries, places where opportunity is limited by a lack of the cheap and plentiful energy that allowed rich nations to develop. In Africa, electricity is so rare that total monthly consumption per person is often less than what a single refrigerator uses during that time. This absence of energy access hampers economic growth. Case in point: The rich world, on average, has 530 tractors per 10,000 acres of farmland, while impoverished parts of Africa have fewer than one.
Climate Change activists try to paper over these realities by arguing that poverty and climate change are inextricably linked. Yet research repeatedly shows that spending on core development priorities would help much more and much faster per dollar spent than applying funds to climate. Real development investments can dramatically change lives for the better right now and make poorer countries more resilient against climate-related problems such as diseases and natural disasters. By contrast, even drastic emission reductions won’t deliver noticeably different outcomes for a generation or more, if ever.
It’s no wonder that a World Bank poll reported that climate ranks far down the priority list of people living in poorer countries. A second survey of leaders in low—and middle-income countries conducted in 2021 similarly found education, employment, peace, and health at the top of development priorities, with climate coming 12th out of 16 issues.
Efforts to divert development aid to climate policy are also laden with hypocrisy. Though rich nations refuse to fund fossil-fuel-related projects abroad—either directly or through international financial institutions—high-income countries still get almost 80% of their energy from fossil fuels.
As a result, global greenhouse gas emissions grew to an all-time high in 2023, with consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas each near record levels as worldwide energy demand continues to grow. This is despite global renewable-energy investments of almost $12 trillion in the nine years ending in 2023. The latest United Nations emissions report projects that emissions in 2030 will be almost twice as high as a level compatible with Paris Climate Accords goals.
The challenges in reducing emissions have long been evident to the few who cared to understand demographics, economics, and energy technologies. Ambitious goals are colliding with techno-economic realities.
Yesterday’s liberal cause célèbre of diverting the wealth of rich nations to help poorer nations become self-sufficient in food, health, and education has been subordinated to climate activists’ energy transition goals. Most of us – dare I say the more reasonable among us – see this as yet another dubious liberal experiment to remake society, this time putting the world’s poor at risk.
As summarized in a Hoover Institution article, the energy transition’s purported climate benefits are distant, vague, and uncertain, while the costs and disruption of rapid decarbonization are immediate and substantial. I agree with the article’s author when he says the world has many more urgent needs, including the provision of reliable and affordable energy to all.
