Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the United States will send $3 billion to the “Green Climate Fund,” an organization financed by rich countries committed to keeping underdeveloped countries poor and vulnerable. The announcement was made this week at the United Nations (UN) COP28 climate summit in Dubai. This $3 billion comes in addition to the $2 billion the U.S. has already contributed to the fund.
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is a UN organization that claims to promote “climate action in developing countries.” The GCF collects billions of dollars from developed nations and supposedly invests said funds into green energy projects in poor nations. The organization is known for its lack of public transparency, and its higher-ups have been accused of victimizing employees via abuse of power, racism, sexism, harassment, and inappropriate relationships.
But it isn’t just secrecy and alleged workplace harassment that should worry the American taxpayers who are bankrolling and expanding the GCF. Indeed, the GCF is part of a neocolonialist movement to prevent developing countries from using the life-saving fossil fuels the Western world obtained decades ago.
Contrary to what UN climate cultists would have us believe, green energy is unreliable and insufficient. Additionally, fossil fuels improve the lives of billions of people by providing them with heating, air conditioning, weather warning systems, mass irrigation, and durable buildings. It is largely thanks to fossil fuels that climate-related disaster deaths have reduced by 99 percent compared to 100 years ago.
In his 2018 book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, climatedepot.com founder Marc Morano included a speech delivered by South African development activist Leon Louw at the 2011 UN Climate Conference. During his speech, Louw explained how the GCF is hurting the citizens of poor nations. “Government to government aid is a reward for being better than anyone else at causing poverty,” stated Louw. “It enriches the people who cause poverty. … The UN is saying to poor countries: ‘Those of you who adopt more anti-prosperity, anti-jobs, and anti-growth policies—under the pretense of environmentalism—we will enrich you.’”
According to Louw, crooked leaders in Third World countries, who are supposed to be investing in green energy projects, instead often spend the funds “on themselves, meaning various government projects, creating bigger departments—bigger bureaucracies, it’s called big bureaucratic capture. They build empires, they build conference centers, and they buy political support. They go and distribute the money to communities where they want support and votes.”
“Climate policies have a cost, and these predominantly hurt the poor,” explained Danish political scientist and statistician Bjørn Lomborg in Morano’s book. “So in choosing to spend that $10 billion on renewables, we deliberately end up choosing to leave more than 70 million people in darkness and poverty.”
The UN doesn’t just promote pointless green energy projects and corrupt politicians. Western nations, including the U.S., collectively and purposely conspire to squash fossil fuel energy projects in developing nations. For instance, during the UN’s COP26 conference, 25 wealthy nations pledged to either stop or radically limit financial support for international fossil fuel projects.
Eco-Imperialists Say ‘Let Them Eat Cake’
In his book, Morano recounted how, at the 2002 UN Earth Summit, he asked then-Democratic California governor Jerry Brown if he thought citizens from poor nations did not want to develop economically. Brown responded, “Many do, but it’s not viable … the developed model cannot work without another five planets.”
Likewise, in 2013, then-President Barack Obama told a group of young African leaders during a town hall in South Africa that “If everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over — unless we find new ways of producing energy.”
In other words, rich, eco-imperialist countries, like the U.S., have decided poor nations are not allowed to increase their quality of life. “The developed world is denying a billion people of color in the developing world—Asia, Africa, South America—the coal, natural gas, and other carbon-based energy that they need to pull themselves up out of dire poverty, as the wealthy Western world has already done,” wrote Morano. “There is an unmistakable racial component to this: black and brown people are essentially being told they can never be allowed to have the same standard of living [] the predominantly white Western world has enjoyed since the industrial revolution.”
The consequences of green colonialism are dire. “Only one in three Africans has access to electricity,” reports the World Bank, and the limited available electricity tends to be unreliable. In Sub-Saharan Africa, “31 out of 49 countries experience daily power outages.” Meanwhile, the life expectancy in Africa is generally around a decade shorter than in the rest of the world. “No number of solar panels on top of huts made of animal dung is a long-term solution for grinding poverty,” Morano pointed out. “A simple fact needs to be recognized: carbon-based energy has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind.”
Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less, has spent his career explaining how fossil fuels are largely responsible for the developed world’s lower poverty rates, longer life expectancies, and lower infant mortality rates. As Epstein wrote in his book, thanks to fossil fuels, “We don’t take a safe environment and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous environment and make it far safer.”
Not only do COP28 attendees not care about the inhabitants of poor nations, but they also clearly do not care about the environment. By promoting poverty in poor countries, the UN is actively harming the earth because wealthier nations are proven to have cleaner environments and put less strain on natural resources. Moreover, the world’s wealthiest 1 percent account for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66 percent. So, if Kamala Harris and everyone at COP28 actually cared about the planet, they would show it by amending their own behavior. (Perhaps they begin by canceling all future UN climate summits, which attendees travel to every year on private jets).
“This is an administration that brags about equity,” Morano told The Federalist, pointing out the hypocrisy of the “equitable” Biden administration preventing poor countries from benefiting off the fossil fuel energy production we enjoy here in the U.S. “What these poor nations need is free markets, innovation, economic growth, and infrastructure,” Morano added. “They don’t need handouts from people who say, ‘Hey, don’t make the ‘mistakes’ we did as we live our lavish lifestyle.’”
