Put Down the Green Man's Burden

The Climate Discussion Nexus has an excellent new video on an under-discussed topic. It's called Eco-Colonialism: The Green Man's Burden, and it looks at the ways in which the West has been actively preventing third-world nations, especially in Africa, from utilizing coal and other inexpensive and reliable energy sources, which have contributed so much to our own economic and civilizational development.

That is, of course, because international organizations like the World Bank, which used to help finance the construction of power plants in those nations, have been entirely captured by environmentalist enthusiasts, who have enacted a de facto ban on contributing to such projects. In the World Bank's case, that has meant a transformation from an organization dedicated to reducing global poverty, to one that ensures it.

As you can guess from the title, the video seeks to draw out some of the parallels between the bad old days of colonialism, as Liberals tend to think of it -- never mind that British colonialism alone brought infrastructure to Africa (now deteriorating) and a stable political system to India, not to mention the English language -- and today. And that case is quite convincing. Because these policies are built around the argument that it doesn't matter what the actual people in these nations desire because we in the West know better, and we will give them what we decide they need, not what they want.

It doesn't take much to know what it is they want, however. You need only ask them. The video includes these two key quotes:

All renewables are intermittent. Renewables have not provided baseload power for anyone in the world. After all, solar works when the sun is shining, wind works when the wind is blowing, hydro works when there is water in the rivers. You must have coal…. I do wish people would reflect on the justice of the situation. -- Piyush Goyal, Minister of Coal, India, February 2016

And:

We in Nigeria have coal but we have a power problem, yet we’ve been blocked because it is not green, there is some hypocrisy because we have the entire western industrialization built on coal energy, that is the competitive advantage that they have been using, now Africa wants to use coal and suddenly they are saying oh! You have to use solar and the wind. -- Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, Finance Minister of Nigeria, October 2016

That is, they desire inexpensive, reliable power, and they resent the Western ideologues in Washington or Brussels who would deny that to them while taking advantage of it themselves. And, notes Climate Discussion Nexus founder John Robson, that resentment is driving these nations right into the arms of Communist China, which is happy to help them out, in exchange for exploitative access to their natural resources.