The Rush To Quickly Eliminate Climate Change Is Crippling Nations And Leaving Them Poorer
It's time to slow down and think this through ...
An interesting Substack post from liberal filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse landed in my inbox today. I want to share a little bit of it with you today because it fits in perfectly with the right’s criticism of the left’s green-agenda obsession.
The piece talks about how, in their rush to quickly stamp out climate change, modern neoliberal global elites are behaving as foolishly authoritarian as their predecessors. Back in the early 2020s, their predecessors tried to force every country to adopt our own free-market system. This reportedly engendered both positives and negatives:
Global development was supercharged, bringing rural populations more rapidly out of poverty, but also shredding social safety nets, destroying local customs, hamstringing nations in debt, accelerating inequality and exacerbating economic disasters like the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and social catastrophes like the rise of Russia’s gangster oligarchy.
I’m no history buff, so I can’t say for certain that Woodhouse’s assessment is correct. I’d need to first seek the counsel of a genuine wise guy like Ben Shapiro. He knows literally everything. That being said, forget the past for a moment.
Instead think about the fact that something similar is happening now, except this time the neoliberal global elites are trying to force every country to go green. But in the process, they're crippling nations and also provoking growing rebellion:
Just as so many of the populations made destitute by the IMF, the World Bank and, later, the EU exploded into riots in countries all over the world, from Argentina to Indonesia to Egypt to Greece, as actual human societies rebelled against the “laws” of the market, we have begun to see the same responses to austerity measures imposed in the name of climate emergency. We saw it first four years ago in France, as the revolt of the Yellow Vests over a gas tax hike paralyzed the government of Emmanuel Macron. Last week we saw it in Sri Lanka, whose government has collapsed in the face of riots sparked in large measure by a ban on chemical fertilizers promoted by Western transnational organizations like the World Bank and Western elite thought leaders like Michael Pollan. And now we’re seeing it in the Netherlands, where livestock farmers are rebelling against their government’s imposition of draconian restrictions on their industry’s nitrogen and ammonium emissions.
If the wave of global protests against forced austerity regimes at the end of the last century was a revolt against the elite’s fantasy of the self-regulating free market, today it’s manifesting itself as a revolt against the elite’s callous and authoritarian responses to the reality of climate change. Just as with the commodification of land, labor and money, these adaptations entail radical and potentially ruinous disruptions of entrenched ways of living and working, imposed on those whose lives are already precarious. And once again, the people who are dictating the terms are the ones who will suffer least from them.
Regarding Sri Lanka, I now want to turn your attention to another piece, this one written by ecomodernist thinker Michael Shellenberger.
Writing over at Bari Weiss’ Substack, Shellenberger talks about how Sri Lanka had successfully been building itself up as a developed nation up until modern neoliberal global elites convinced its leaders to go green.
As a result, "Sri Lanka’s two million farmers were forced to stop using fertilizers and pesticides," and the results were horrific:
One-third of Sri Lanka’s farm lands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90 percent of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85 percent experienced crop losses. Rice production fell 20 percent and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose fivefold. All this had a dramatic impact on the more than 15 million people of the country’s 22 million people who are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.
Things were worse for smaller farmers. In the Rajanganaya region, where the majority of farmers operate two-and-a-half-acre lots, families reported 50 percent to 60 percent reductions in their harvest. “Before the ban, this was one of the biggest markets in the country, with tons and tons of rice and vegetables,” one farmer said earlier this year. “But after the ban, it became almost zero. If you talk to the rice mills, they don’t have any stock because people’s harvest dropped so much. The income of this whole community has dropped to an extremely low level.”
This, coupled with skyrocketing oil prices, COVID lockdowns, debt, etc., eventually led to the following:
Over in Africa meanwhile, Europe has for years been pressing the continent to go green. But amid the current crisis in Ukraine, suddenly Europe is itself sidling up to "dirty" energy while leaving Africa holding the bag.
“In other words, rich nations have decided that the current energy emergency lets them burn whichever fuel they like, whereas poor countries aren’t allowed that choice at all. In African capitals, this looks like obvious hypocrisy—or worse,” Foreign Policy magazine notes.
The Africans reportedly aren’t pleased.
“The leaders of Uganda, Nigeria, Malawi, and Senegal have all lashed out at Europe’s stance. African social media is filled with rage over what many perceive as a neocolonialist conspiracy to keep Africans poor,” according to Foreign Policy.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should, because it parallels what occurred during the COVID crisis when rich and wealthy elites forced draconian diktats upon the rest of us, but then turned around and flagrantly violated their own rules.
Regarding climate change, I believe it is indeed a problem that must be tackled. But likewise, I unapologetically stand with the likes of Shellenberger, who believes the solution to climate change lies in technological innovation, not authoritarian diktats.
This is merely my personal belief, of course, but just look at the evidence of what authoritarian diktats invariably produce every single time: inequality, economic upheaval, community destruction, and eventually rebellion.
The bottom line is that the rush to quickly stamp out climate change is crippling nations. This is an easily observable, established fact, and we see it playing out all across the world, but particularly so in countries that are trying to come up.
Should we try to resolve climate change one way or another? Yes! Should we rush into it at the expense of the global working class? Hell no!