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While the media eagerly covered G-7 leaders glad-handing themselves and cheering the return of the United States to multilateralism at their recent meeting in the United Kingdom, a much darker side of the meeting was largely unreported or even reported as a positive outcome.
Climate activists and their media allies were much chagrined that the G-7 would not agree on a fixed date to stop burning coal. Germany plans to burn coal until at least 2038. Japan is building new coal plants at home and financing them around the world. And despite the best efforts of the Obama-Biden administration, much of the U.S. remains reliant on coal and will be so for years to come.
But don’t get the idea that the Biden administration supports coal or recognizes its value to the U.S. electric grid.
“At the 11th hour, however, Biden’s officials became nervous about the impact on domestic politics and the White House refused to sign off on [a timeline for end coal use], which then had to be left out of the final summit communique, according to officials, and a diplomatic note summarizing the meetings,” reported Bloomberg.
President Joe Biden perhaps has learned the lesson Hillary Clinton did when she lost the 2016 election, in part, because of her promise to leave Pennsylvania coal miners unemployed.
Although the G-7 wouldn’t agree to end its own coal use, it did agree to stop financing coal projects in poor countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, by the end of 2021.
There remain about a billion people in the world, virtually all black and brown, without access to affordable, reliable electricity — or any electricity at all. The G-7 decision to cut off financing for coal projects in these countries condemns these people to poverty and death — unless their nations can cut deals with predatory Communist China under its Belt and Road Initiative.
The is not the first time that first-world environmentalism has led to what former environmental activist Paul Driessen’s aptly titled book calls Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death. Western do-gooders have had a long and callous indifference, if not outright hostility, to poor black and brown people around the world.
In his book The Malaria Capers: Tales of Parasites and People, parasitologist Robert Desowitz summed up the attitude of U.S. Agency for International Development toward them as “better dead than alive and riotously reproducing.”
And USAID got its wish when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in one of its first major actions, banned the insecticide DDT in 1972. Although the EPA’s ban technically only applied in the U.S., environmental activists saw that the ban was exported and that it stayed in place for more than 30 years until the World Health Organization mercifully abandoned the ban in the mid-2000s.
In the meantime, tens of millions of Africans, mostly children, died from malaria and other preventable diseases.
Around the world today, foreign aid is often tied to a country’s obeisance to first-world environmentalist demands and campaigns against electrification and natural resource development projects.
Few and far between are foreign leaders with the guts or honesty to snub environmentalists. At the 2019 G-7 conference, France tried to bribe Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to reduce the much-needed economic development of the Amazon jungle. But Bolsonaro refused: “We are thankful, but maybe those resources would be more relevant to reforest Europe.”
Still today, 7,500 children die every day from malnutrition, according to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. And although this tragedy is easily understood and readily solvable, it is largely ignored even as environmental activists advocate spending trillions of dollars per year fretting about what the weather will be like in the year 2100.
The G-7’s new pledge to ban affordable electricity from the world’s poor is just the latest do-gooder’s inhumanity to man.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.