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Live Earth – Dead Africans
by Paul K. Driessen
Live Earth – Dead Africans?
Policies that prevent energy development have lethal consequences for Africa
Paul Driessen
Promoters claim the Live Earth concerts drew 2 billion fans – a number equal to people worldwide who still don’t have access to electricity. Others say the actual audience was a fraction of that – a few tens of millions, including via television and webcasts.
About 45,000 attended the actual concert in Australia, 100,000 in Brazil, a few hundred in Washington, DC. In Johannesburg, the first snow in 25 years was blamed for almost nobody showing up. (If this snow was due to climate change, what caused the snow 25 years ago?) Elsewhere the heat was blamed. And only 4.5 million watched the BBC television broadcast in Britain.
However, the concerts might be deemed successful if measured by cash the promoters raked in. By gasoline and aviation fuel burned to get to the events (the stars alone flew a combined 223,000 miles, says the New York Post). By wattage consumed and greenhouse gases emitted to power televisions and air-conditioners for stay-at-home fans. Or by the overheated and often hypocritical rhetoric of global warming catastrophe.
Al Gore demanded immediate action, but ignored his own profligate consumption: over a thousand flights (mostly first class or in private jets) to warn of a “climate crisis,” a house that uses 20 times more electricity than the average US home, and more in a week than 26 million Ugandans together use in a year.
Prince Charles’ three mansions produce 500 times the CO2 emissions of the average British home, and he and his entourages routinely burn thousands of gallons of fuel on globe-trotting flights.
Madonna wailed that people must “jump up and down” to prevent the alleged crisis and “save the planet” – then took a private jet back to one of her nine houses and fleets of gas-guzzling cars.
Actor Ed Begley, Jr. uses alternative energy to supplement enormous amounts of non-alternative electricity that powers the community and movie studios that make his lifestyle and career possible. He believes Africans, by contrast, should have electricity only where they need it: little solar panels “on their huts.”
These alarmists attempt to justify their extravagant lifestyles by grandstanding at Live Earth concerts – and purchasing energy-efficient light bulbs or “carbon offset” indulgences (eg, having someone else plant trees somewhere). With their next breath, they say other people’s energy consumption could cause catastrophic global warming that could bring record cold and heat waves, terrible floods and droughts, disease epidemics and species extinctions.
The only “evidence” they have for any of this are worst-case scenarios produced by computer models that do not accurately reflect complex atmospheric processes and cannot predict temperature or rainfall even one year in the future – much less 40 or 90 years. That’s like saying the movie “Jurassic Park” proves scientists can bring dinosaurs back to life.
But if the concerts cause more people to demand that Africa and other poor countries not develop the energy they so desperately need, these false global warming “solutions” could be disastrous for the world’s most impoverished citizens.
Some 95% of Sub-Saharan Africans still do not have electricity, lights or refrigeration – or have them only a few hours a week. As a result, millions die every year from lung infections caused by pollution from wood and dung fires, and acute intestinal diseases caused by tainted water and spoiled food. Millions more die from diseases that would be largely eradicated by the improved living standards, healthcare systems and agriculture that come with prosperity, modern technology and abundant energy. The situation is likewise dire in many other areas.
But Al Gore, Live Earth rock stars and radical pressure groups like Rainforest Action and Greenpeace constantly battle energy projects in poor countries. They oppose coal and gas-fired power plants because of speculative global warming, hydroelectric projects because they dam up rivers, nuclear power because it generates radioactive wastes. They expect African and other poor nations to base their future on insufficient, expensive, unreliable wind and solar energy. That is a virtual guarantor of perpetual poverty.
Environmentalists also oppose biotechnology to improve agricultural output, insecticides to reduce malaria and other diseases, and even jetliners that bring tourists to Africa and African produce to Europe.
At bottom, environmentalists don’t want the world’s poor to rise up out of poverty and become middle class, because then they would become consumers, use more resources and demand more electricity. Green activists are happy to demand more aid and debt relief, but they do everything possible to prevent energy, mineral and economic development, modern agriculture and living standards, or meaningful opportunities for the world’s poor to take their rightful places among the Earth’s healthy and prosperous people.
Poor countries should worry not about climate change – but about whether they will have electricity for refrigerators, lights, and modern homes, hospitals, schools, shops, offices and factories. They should be concerned not about the supposed (and often far-fetched) risks of development and technology – but about the real, immediate, life-threatening dangers that development and technology would prevent.
Our climate has always been turbulent, unstable and unpredictable. While the scientific debate continues to rage over the mechanisms and consequences of climate change, growing numbers of scientists say there is little evidence that humans and carbon dioxide are the primary cause, or that human influences will bring catastrophic change. (A number of these scientists are featured in the new British television documentary, “The Great Global Warming Swindle” and Chris Horner’s book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism.”)
Ice core and other data indicate that, over the past 650,000 years, temperatures usually rose first and CO2 levels increased several centuries later. That’s the inconvenient truth about Al Gore’s alarmist theory.
Other studies point to the sun as the dominant cause of climate change. As its energy output increases, the Earth warms, stronger solar winds reduce the cosmic rays that help generate clouds, fewer clouds cause our planet to warm still more, and warmer oceans release more CO2 into the atmosphere. Less solar energy results in reduced solar wind, more cosmic rays and thus more clouds – further cooling the planet.
If solar scientists are correct, in another decade or so, the sun will begin its weakest cycle in two centuries, possibly leading to another period of global cooling.
The lesson for poor nations is simple. Their people need – and deserve – abundant, reliable, affordable energy to power modern, industrialized, healthy, prosperous nations. Governments and communities must help facilitate this process, and challenge anti-energy pressure groups whenever necessary.
Poor countries don’t have to depend on the World Bank or foreign aid – any more than Britain and the United States had to rely on them to develop and prosper. If their institutions and policies are sound, poor countries and communities can get the investment money and technology they need from private domestic and foreign sources.
African, Asian, Latin American and Eastern European countries have abundant oil, gas, coal, nuclear and hydroelectric resources. And they have the ultimate resource – the brain power, creativity and proud work ethic of their people.
If they can harness these resources, and unleash the power of free enterprise – under sound legal, regulatory, economic and property rights systems – they will generate previously unimaginable opportunity, health and prosperity for their people.
________________
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ∙ Black death (www.Eco-Imperialism.com), and one of the experts profiled in “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”
© 2004 Eco-Imperialism.com. All rights reserved.
http://www.eco-imperialism.com
An economic suicide pact for Europe and the US
Climate alarmism threatens intense pain, for no environmental gain
by Paul K. Driessen
January 28, 2007
Europeans have worked themselves into such a lather over “climate chaos” that they’ve set themselves up for a head-on collision between eco-ideology and economic reality. With the new Democratic Congress poised to ram through heavy-handed climate legislation, the US may be heading down the same path.
At long last, European economic ministers and CEOs are realizing they cannot meet even current Kyoto commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% below 1990 levels, by 2012. They are voicing growing concern that Kyoto will hammer consumers and living standards, and send facilities and jobs to China, India and other nations that aren’t required to cut emissions.
Despite lofty green rhetoric, Spain is some 20% above its target, Italy 15% – Austria 25 percent. At “just” 7% above its target, Germany faces a future with no nuclear power (by law it must shut down all reactors by 2020), no coal-fired generators (greenhouse gases), little hydroelectric (4% of its total electricity), unreliable natural gas (Russia controls the spigots), and forests of gigantic, undependable wind turbines.
But the European Commission won’t budge. Instead, it’s demanding even more draconian reductions by 2020. It knows even perfect compliance with Kyoto would keep global temperatures from rising only 0.2 degrees F by 2050 – assuming CO2 really is the culprit, rather than the sun and other natural forces that obviously controlled previous climate shifts.
That’s why alarmists now say we must slash total global emissions by 60-80% by 2050, to keep CO2 at a “safe” level and “stabilize” a climate that has never been stable. If poor developing nations remain exempt (as they should), developed countries will have to go virtually carbon-free to reach this goal.
The impact would be catastrophic. Such actions would change life as we know it. They would give alarmist politicians, bureaucrats and activists a leading role in every housing, heating, cooling, transportation, manufacturing, agricultural, business and consumer decision.
They would terminate millions of jobs, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and send living standards tumbling, while giving every US citizen a “carbon allowance” akin to what other parts of the world now “enjoy” (2.3 tons of CO2 per year in Cuba or 1.2 in India, versus our current 19.8 or Canada’s 17.9).
The elderly and minority workers and families would be especially hard hit. Deaths from winter cold and summer heat waves would soar, as energy prices rise and heating and air-conditioning become luxury items.
Memo to Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince Charles: Switching to fluorescent bulbs isn’t the answer, and few envision you living in cottages or becoming jetliner-free homebodies. So what will you personally do to cut your energy use and emissions 40, 60 or 95 percent? What will the rest of America do?
Saying we can’t afford the expense, some senators and congressmen want to chop $1 billion off the Coast Guard budget. But they appear willing to have America sacrifice hundreds of billions a year in direct costs, lost jobs and plummeting GDP, as climate rules go into effect.
Members of Congress railed against $3-per-gallon gasoline last year, but now appear happy to push all energy prices sharply higher, to “save the world” from a far-fetched climate Armageddon. They don’t seem to realize that abundant, reliable, affordable energy is the backbone of the entire US economy. Tampering with the energy system – locking up oil and gas, or making it harder to use or pay for fossil fuels – puts jobs, families and national security at risk.
Other than fossil fuels, no technologies exist to provide the 100,000 megawatts of new electricity the US will need during the next decade. Nuclear plants can’t come online that quickly, even if Congress streamlines the glacial approval process. And even the best wind turbines would require some 2 million acres (Delaware plus Rhode Island) to provide 100,000 MW of intermittent electricity that requires gas-powered generators (and drilling off our coasts) as backup.
Europe already has green taxes on air travel, a $50-a-day climate charge on big cars in London – and a proposed “food miles” tax on the distance produce is shipped. Already Rainforest Action and CERES are pressuring US banks not to finance coal generators, dams and fossil fuel projects in the US or Africa. Compliant banks are caving in, and calling it “socially responsible,” while EU and UN officials are telling Africans that climate change is a greater threat than malaria, TB, HIV/AIDS or poverty.
Efforts to restrict energy and economic development in Africa are “literally a life-and-death matter” for tens of millions on that continent, says University of Pretoria emeritus professor WJR Alexander. “We can do without this resurgence of European colonialism and paternalism.”
Yes, there is consensus that Earth’s temperatures have risen slightly, and humans played a role. But there is no consensus that climate change is imminent and will be catastrophic, human CO2 emissions are the primary cause, or slashing emissions will prevent the supposed cataclysm.
It’s a classic bait-and-switch tactic, repeated endlessly in a well-coordinated propaganda campaign by activists, scientists, journalists, bureaucrats, celebrities and politicians. They used similar tactics 30 years ago to excise DDT and other insecticides from disease control programs. Tens of millions died from malaria – and not one of the perpetrators has ever apologized, admitted error, or been penalized or otherwise held accountable for the unconscionable disease, brain damage and death they perpetuated.
Now they say we should trust them on climate change.
Computer models, headlines, weather anomalies and horror movies are not evidence. We’d never rely on 50 or even 2-year computer forecasts to make investment decisions. To trust family, state, corporate and national futures to deficient climate models is sheer folly. To silence climate chaos skeptics, ignore inconvenient questions and truths that Al Gore dislikes, circumvent inconvenient congressmen like John Dingell, and railroad through life-altering climate legislation is to commit economic seppuku.
Why do many support such legislation? Follow the money, says meteorologist James Spann. “Billions of dollars of grant money are flowing into the pockets of [scientists] on the man-made global warming bandwagon.” For activists, bureaucrats and politicians, it’s money, power and control. For companies, it’s avoiding public floggings, and selling new lines of politically correct, often tax-subsidized or legally mandated technologies. If there’s no crisis, the gravy train dies up.
We can and should develop new technologies, to further improve energy efficiency, reduce pollution and enter a new era of energy generation. But we need not and must not rush to judgment, trash our economy or slash our living standards, just to “do something” about a speculative climate change “catastrophe.”
We need a rational debate, with all views fully represented – not a media and congressional circus, and certainly not a legislative juggernaut more suited to Zimbabwe or North Korea than to the United States.
_____________
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ∙ Black death (www.Eco-Imperialism.com)
© 2004 Eco-Imperialism.com. All rights reserved.
http://www.eco-imperialism.com
The truth about malaria and DDT
Inaccurate claims about DDT are killing African children. People need to learn the facts.
by Paul K. Driessen
July 17, 2006
Malaria continues to be the biggest single killer of African children. However, years of effort to improve malaria control programs are finally bearing fruit.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, and hundreds of physicians, clergy and human rights advocates signed the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes NOW declaration, demanding that substantial funds be spent on indoor spraying with DDT, Artemisia-based combination therapies (ACT drugs), bed nets and other commodities – not just on conferences, reports, education and “capacity building,” as important as those things also are. (See www.FightingMalaria.org for details.)
In response to legislation enacted by the United States Congress, the U.S. Agency for International Development is buying commodities and assisting with spraying programs. The new director of the World Health Organization’s global malaria program has announced that indoor spraying with DDT will be an integral component of WHO’s comprehensive new strategies. And mining and other companies are conducting successful anti-malaria programs that take the same approach.
DDT is not a silver bullet. Bed nets, larvacides, other insecticides, education, medicines and other weapons are also essential. However, it is a vital component of a truly integrated program to control this devastating disease. Simply put, no other chemical – at any price – can do what DDT does.
It is the cheapest, longest lasting, most effective repellant and insecticide known to man. Just spraying a tiny amount on the eaves and walls of a home, just once or twice a year, keeps 90% of mosquitoes from even entering. (Even just hanging a couple strips of DDT-impregnated cloth near the door keeps half of them from coming in.) It also irritates any that do enter, so they don’t bite, and kills those that land.
It’s like a huge bed net over an entire household. Equally important, used this way, DDT is absolutely safe for people and the environment. In fact, it won’t even get into the environment.
This is the system that South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique and Zambia used to slash malaria rates by 75% in less than two years. They were then able to get scarce ACT drugs to people who still got sick, and cut malaria disease and death rates by almost 95% in just three years.
Just think what a similar program could do for other countries. Kenya alone loses 34,000 children below age 5 every year to malaria, according to Health Minister Charity Ngilu. (Uganda endures 70,000 deaths annually.) People who have to stay home from work because they have malaria, or must care for family members who have malaria, cost Kenya 170 million working days and billions of shillings each year.
Imagine reducing that by 75% or more in Kenya alone. Over 25,000 children would live to become future farmers, scientists, political leaders, teachers, musicians and businessmen. Parents could work an additional 127 million days a year. Kenya would be far more healthy and productive. And this amazing success story could be repeated in communities and countries all over Africa.
No wonder my colleagues and I have been absolutely stunned by some of the letters and articles that have appeared recently in Kenyan and Ugandan papers. They contained some of the most fallacious claims we have ever seen regarding DDT. They would be hilarious – if so many lives weren’t at stake, and the claims weren’t damaging Africa’s recent progress in disease control. Here are the facts.
Millions of soldiers and civilians were sprayed right on their bodies with DDT during and after World War II, to prevent malaria and typhus. After the war, DDT was sprayed in massive quantities all over the USA and Europe, to completely eradicate malaria in those countries. Millions of people (including me) played, swam or ate picnics in clouds of DDT.
World-renowned DDT expert Dr. Gordon Edwards used to eat a spoonful of DDT when he gave lectures about it. He finally died, at age 85 – of a heart attack, while hiking in the mountains.
No deaths, cancers or other harm (except skin rashes) were ever demonstrated. Not one replicated scientific study ever found that DDT causes abortions, birth abnormalities, cancer or reduced fertility in humans. US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Ruckelshaus banned DDT, despite his own commission’s conclusion that DDT was safe for people and the environment. He never attended even one hour of the commission’s extensive hearings, never read even one page of its report, and later said his decision was “political,” not scientific.
In fact, the worst thing anti-pesticide activists like Greenpeace even say today is: “some researchers think DDT could be inhibiting lactation and may contribute to lactation failure and low birth weights in babies.” Compare those far-fetched and minor risks to the reality of countless mothers and babies DYING from malaria.
Rachel Carson did die from cancer, but there is no evidence that it was caused by DDT. Cancer is primarily a disease of middle-aged and old people in developed countries. Tragically few Africans will have to worry about it, because far too many will die long before they get cancer, from malaria and other diseases that DDT could help prevent.
As to birds, the only evidence that DDT causes thin eggshells came from faulty experiments in which birds were fed only 20% of their required calcium. When Dr. Bittman did his studies again with proper calcium levels, the eggshells were normal. Ms. Carson worried about a silent spring – but there never was one anywhere in America. Even when she wrote her book, our bird populations were increasing. One writer’s claim, that DDT causes birds to “shit” their eggs, is simply bizarre and preposterous.
Today, DDT is manufactured in one facility in India and one in China. It has not been produced in the United States for nearly 35 years, and we don’t export it anywhere.
As malaria and DDT expert Professor Donald Roberts of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, points out: no WHO report claims that DDT causes brain or other tumors. Remember – the WHO, USAID, Archbishop Tutu and hundreds of doctors and disease experts support the use of DDT for malaria control. They would not do so if the chemical were so toxic.
Yes, DDT can harm fish. But modern indoor spraying programs use tiny amounts of DDT, confine it to household walls, prevent its use in agriculture, and keep it from reaching lakes and rivers.
Yes, the European Union and certain European companies and activists have threatened trade sanctions against African countries that use DDT. That is unconscionable – but an easy position for them to take, since they no longer have malaria, thanks in large part to DDT.
Instead of bowing to their blackmail, though, all African nations should challenge these threats, which put paranoia about barely detectable traces of this life-saving chemical above the lives of African parents and children. Such attitudes should not be tolerated. Access to DDT is protected by the Stockholm Convention and WHO, whose guidelines will ensure that it is used properly, to save lives and safeguard wildlife and the environment.
Friends of the Earth may say its strange notions of “sustainable development” should come first, as one writer asserts. But if its policies control decisions in Africa, the only thing that will be sustained is hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from malaria, year after year.
DDT can be a vital part of the answer to malaria. It can save millions of lives – if we let it. Sound science and real environmental ethics demand that we do so.
_____________
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ∙ Black death (www.Eco-Imperialism.com), and an analyst on malaria, DDT, and other health and environmental issues.
© 2004 Eco-Imperialism.com. All rights reserved.
Read great books on the subject of the Enviroment:
By Marcel Leroux
PRESIDENT OBAMA SAID BEFORE HE WAS ELECTED: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America"
Do these people know that this kind of wack-job belief system will affect EVEN THEM and their kids in the future, we will all equally starve to death from these stupid Obama policies?
Oh! That's right it is affecting MANY in California today as the fires burn those many protected lands that PEOPLE LIVE ON AND HAVE INVESTED THEIR LIVES IN and the dry farms that threaten the food of our nation, but who cares..... we saved our trees from clearing the brush under them 20+ years ago, and might save a fish!
What kind of people betray their own kind and side with animals?
The nut-job kind that's what kind!
Obama czar: U.S. was 'apartheid regime'
Demands 'theology of resistance, liberation' to transform society
Posted: September 03, 2009
12:03 pm Eastern
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
"We forget sometimes that the people who poured out their blood on the ground in this country, to turn an apartheid regime into a struggling, fledgling democracy, the so-called civil rights workers, when they went to face the dogs, when they went to face the fire hoses, when they sat shivering in cold jail cells soaked in blood, when they faced lynch mobs, when they found their children shot down in the street, they didn't march at laundromats , they didn't march at high school gymnasiums.
he said.
{END OF ARTICLE}
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