Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
We know how utterly biased the BBC are when it comes to climate change, and how left wing they are.
They put the two together in this article which is nothing more than a piece of political propaganda:
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it was the city’s black neighbourhoods that bore the brunt of the storm. Twelve years later, it was the black districts of Houston that took the full force of Hurricane Harvey. In both cases, natural disasters compounded issues in neighbourhoods that were already stretched.
Climate change and racism are two of the biggest challenges of the 21st Century. They are also strongly intertwined. There is a stark divide between who has caused climate change and who is suffering its effects. People of colour across the Global South are those who will be most affected by the climate crisis, even though their carbon footprints are generally very low. Similar racial divides exist within nations too, due to profound structural inequalities laid down by a long legacy of unequal power relationships.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220125-why-climate-change-is-inherently-racist
I won’t bore you with the rest of what follows. It is the usual load of tedious wokeness, with little basis in fact, and is simply the extremist viewpoint of the author.
It is based on the false assumption that both the Global South as a whole and minorities in western countries are adversely affected by the West’s industrialisation. To quote anthropologist Jason Hickel::
“The nations of the Global North have effectively colonised the atmospheric commons. They’ve enriched themselves as a result, but with devastating consequences for the rest of the world and for all of life on Earth.”
We have of course been down this road before. By every metric the third world is immeasurably better off now than before the industrial revolution. This is no coincidence, it is a direct result of economic growth and technological development, all enabled by fossil fuels.
But poorer communities are always more vulnerable to the vagaries of weather, or indeed any natural calamity. The answer to that is not the abolition of fossil fuels, but to make those communities wealthier to enable them to be more resilient.
And, of course, that is exactly what has been going on in the last few decades. Thanks to economic development in the West, the third world economy has also been growing, benefitting from trade and western technology and expertise, not from aid.
The BBC article uses Zambia as a specific example:
Zambia clearly demonstrates this injustice of climate change. Average carbon footprints in Zambia are very low, coming in at just 0.36 tonnes per person per year – less than one-tenth of the UK average. Nevertheless, the country is facing environmental disaster, including a prolonged drought which left over a million people in need of food assistance in 2021.
“Zambia has been experiencing the negative impact of climate variability and change for the last three decades,” says Zambian climate scientist Mulako Kabisa. “The biggest impact has been increased temperature and reduced rainfall, resulting in climate shocks that include droughts and floods.”
These changes in rainfall and temperature have resulted in crop failure, livestock deaths and reduced the country’s GDP, she adds. “Droughts in particular have led to livelihood loss for the smallholder-dominated agricultural sector, because production is dependent on availability of adequate rain.”
While specific events are often tricky to attribute directly to climate change, the IPCC has observed all these impacts in Southern Africa already. Worse is likely to come. “Local evidence and simulated projections all indicate that rainfall will be more variable,” says Kabisa. “The production season will shift and drought incidents will be more frequent.”
These experiences of climate breakdown generally don’t make the news. In an overview of the most under-reported humanitarian crises of 2021, Zambia came in at number one.
For the Zambian climate activist Veronica Mulenga, the justice implications are clear. “The climate crisis affects some parts of the planet more than others,” she says. “Historical and present-day injustices have both left black, indigenous and people-of-colour communities exposed to far greater environmental health hazards than white communities. Those most affected by climate change are black and poor communities. As a continent we are one of the hardest hit by the impacts of climate change and we are left behind as the world progresses toward a low-carbon economy. Without taking into account those most affected, climate solutions will turn into climate exclusion.”
This exclusion extends to international negotiations, where Mulenga says her country has been marginalised. “African voices are not well represented in climate summits, leaving climate justice out of the equation,” says Mulenga. “At COP26 a lack of vaccines and funding available for African countries prevented many delegates and activists from taking part in the negotiations, including myself. Racism and white supremacy have long excluded African voices from environmental policy.”
This sort of amateurish language belongs in a student common room, not in a supposedly objective, informative BBC report.
But where are the facts to back up these juvenile claims? Far from being hard done by, Zambians are twice as well off as they were just a couple of decades ago:
In particular, agricultural output, while showing the effects of drought in the last couple of years, has been rapidly expanding since the 1990s. The final year in the series, which is 2019, still saw the third highest output on record.
Dips in output, as seen lately, have happened before, and have nothing to do with climate change.
As for climate change induced droughts, the World Bank Portal clearly shows there has been no long terms in rainfall for Zambia, though the 1960s and 70s were a much wetter period:
And they comment:
Of course, the BBC won’t tell you that, because it would spoil their climate narrative.
FOOTNOTE
If you think this lot is eerily familiar, you would be right!
The author, Jeremy Williams, published a book last year, called Climate Change Is Racist. I reviewed it at the time here, and it was as childishly absurd as this BBC piece is.
According to his Amazon blurb, Williams is is a writer and campaigner for environmental and social justice. He writes at The Earthbound Report (twice recognised as Britain’s leading green blog) and is editor of the Extinction Rebellion book Time to Act.
He has every right to promulgate his opinions, but why is the BBC giving oodles of publicity to a self-confessed eco-activist, without even any attempt to challenge what he says or publish alternate views?
From the little I know, Zambia depends rather too much on hydroelectric supplies, whch are ultimately just another weather dependent electric source. Failure to invest in backups is the major problem.
chinese built and exorbitant costs to the people sorta hydro??
Racist? I thought women and children were going to be hardest hit. *eyeroll*
How could anyone write such nonsense and still claim to be sentient?
There is a new carbon (actually carbon dioxide) variant about that can do or be blamed on just about anything one wants. In the vein of a Joseph Heller novel, the insanity of CO2-2 is a global pandemic.
A real “health emergency” in the “urban” zones where an explosion of asthma in the black community is turning good kids to a life of crime and murder … Right?
it took me 45sec. to write nonsense equal to this BBC tripe.
well if they are asthmatics they wont be running far when collared will they;-) wheezing thief caught in a 50 yard dash etc
H.R., Something like all the children of Lake Wobegon being above average, all clients of the Demonrat state are hardest hit. But some clients are more hardest hit than others.
I never knew that my friend down in Texas was black. His home was flooded by a hurricane so now I know his true race.
How the Left Was Lost
Bill Maher
I don’t trust Darth Vader’s daughter.
I trust no politician. A guy who grew up next to me became a state rep – before he got that- he seemed pretty normal- after he got that job- he turned into a slick guy always with the big smile and handshake and no matter what I said to him, he’s always say, “good idea Joe- be sure to keep voting for me”. Somehow, he retired in his ’40s from that job as a millionaire- back when that was considered a lot of money – of course by now it’s considered spare change to the ultra rich out there.
I never cared much for Bill Maher but at least he’s been consistent in his beliefs whereby he calls them as he sees them.
There is an old joke that republicans get rich and go into politics. Democrats go into politics and then get rich.
Take the Clintons and the Obamas! Please, take them!
When Obama was a Senator he was still paying off his student loans.
Now that was a good catch.
A big Tip-O-The-Hat to Joseph Zorzin.
If you can be bothered to download it , This is the GISSTemp temperature data for Zambia
On the adjusted data no trend .a balmy 20 deg C average. The unadjusted shows 2 DEg C warmer in the thirties but there might well be a station parameter shift. Anyway no remarkable temperature change in this sation
The otyher Zambian stations are much of a muchness.
Please can I have a refund on my licence fee
You certainly cannot. Paying people to write crap costs money.
Alistair: South Africa, Australia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Canada, USA, Greenland, Iceland, Europe …; all have raw temperature patterns for the 20thC that are remarkably similar to that of the USA where the late 1930s are the temperature highs, followed by a 40yr cooling and the the end of the century warming. The super el Niño of 1998 did not set a new high in the US (it was actually fiddled higher by J. Hansen in 2007 just before retiring).
Paul Homewood, you have done a lot on this subject. Please do another post on it for those who never saw your first one.
An early ‘Boomer’, I was (mis-)educated by an, even then liberal, public school system. It was there that I was taught that “Ugly Americans” became rich only by “exploiting” their rich natural resources, which were available only through “luck”. I failed to be taught that it wasn’t luck at all. Rather, it was a political system that placed economic freedom above government control. Fortunately for me, I learned just a month after matriculating, that the same government also confiscated much of my personal hard-earned wealth, and then went on to waste it. That lesson came with my first paycheck and was then reinforced more and more each month for the next half dozen decades.
The real lesson is that wealth comes NOT from luck, it comes from an economic system that produces more value than the cost of the labor that creates it. The source of that wealth can be anywhere from children digging cobalt in Africa to scientists placing satellites in orbit. In all cases, labor creates it, and governments destroy it. When the economic system destroys more wealth than it creates, most of its entire population becomes poor. When the government consumes less than is created most of its population has the opportunity to become wealthy. It’s up to each individual to actually make it happen.
Great comment Tom.
…. and as to the use of the word juvenile in the article, I’ve been struggling with that one. I used to think, having been educated at a UK University in the seventies, that it was the leftist and phony-leftist nitwits who had never got out of their political short pants after they left, i.e. never moved on from juvenile, but now its seems to have morphed into a more sinister form of parasitism for the useless, elitist [insert your own choice of bad language here].
Great comment. Especially succinct and insightful is, “The real lesson is that wealth comes NOT from luck, it comes from an economic system that produces more value than the cost of the labor that creates it.”
There are few countries without any natural resources. The difference is whether the political system will allow those resources to be extracted and turned into wealth.
Beyond that, the greatest natural resource, are the humans who live in a country.
Any government that represses the individual will always have an excess of poverty.
Governments that allow individuals to compete and to excel will encourage the creation of wealth that benefits everyone.
Japan is a country not well endowed with natural resources. They even have to import their energy feedstocks, base and precious metals, etc. Yet they became the second largest economy until overtaken by China which had its economy handed to them by Europe and US.
Tom, I am seeing more comments about children digging cobalt in the Congo for one dollar per day, and the suggestions that it needs to be stopped. I agree it needs to be stopped, but only after substitute employment is set up for their families and they are sent to school. To stop it suddenly would eliminate their only source of income, which is to say eliminate their only source of buying food. Some problems need a little study before action.
“People of colour across the Global South are those who will be most affected by the climate crisis, even though their carbon footprints are generally very low.”
and who has the biggest carbon footprints? rich leftists!
and, people who use a term like “people of colour” should realize that the term is racist- not long ago if you used the term “colored people”- you’d be considered a racist- but now they just rearange the words- and it’s ultra PC- we’re not suppossed to notice color, so dam it, stop using that stupid phrase!
‘Carbon People’?
Oh Joe! You’re so 1970s. Not supposed to notice color? How can we have racial preferences and reparations if we can’t notice color? You sound like that old racist Dr ML King Jr.
Yes. In the 1980s I was teaching a class about ‘Ethnic Minorities in the USA (it was the national syllabus for my subject). I used the term ‘coloured people’ and an Asian girl objected to the term. She said I had to call them ‘blacks’. Yet, in the USA, there is an organisation called the NAACP. And what do the letters NAACP stand for? The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
They can’t agree among themselves what they want to be called. It seems every few years there’s a movement to be called by a new and different name.
It is an American organization, Colored, NO U.
If you don’t notice color you can’t have “affirmative action” or other quota based systems that tip-toe around anti-discrimination laws.
The worst of wokeness is the leaders of this ‘social justice’ paradigm are all rich whites. They have created or inspired and certified all the definitions, including critical race theory, all the QWERTY new genders, all the new gender pronouns for addressing the new genders, Crises Climate as a front for white elitist billionaire totalitarian global gov, and it is wokers coercing 3rd World ‘people of color’ to finish themselves off by adopting power sources with all-in costs 500% more costly than fossil fuel sources.
The woke have undertaken to destroy Western economies, culture, history, literature, democracy and freedom. They decry the Age of Enlightenment and its products, Scientific Discovery, the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution which set on its path the lifting of billions out of poverty and poor health.
‘People of Color’ in 3rd World countries fortunately see through the neocolonial plan wokies have for them and they are taking command of their own development based on cheap, readily available fossil fuels, the same stuff that the developed world used for their prosperity.
The first things ANYone notices about ANYone else is their color and sex. We ALL have prejudices and discriminate and we do so daily mostly based mosty on our personal experiences. It is called survival. Most people do not judge others individually but by the history of deeds of others like them.Unfortunate and unfair, but true. My grandparents never saw a black before they immigrated as chikdren in the early 1900s. They had no preconceived notions of race. My grandmother sharecropped with blacks and despised them. Grandfather lived in the city and never displayed any racism.
I have noticed that most who escape the prejudice and discrimination rarely go back to help others in the community. Clean up yourself and your community and respect will follow.
Joseph, noticing skin color is racist. NOT noticing skin color is also racist.
not noticing should be rephrased as- don’t make a big deal out of it- it’s only skin deep
I’m in agreement with you on this. But the wokes claim otherwise. If you don’t acknowledge skin color (and the inherent differences due to that, whatever THOSE are) then you are racist. Likewise, if you DO notice it, you’re also racist.
The author’s bio is below. The thing that continues to amaze me is why a journalism major thinks he can make claims about the science of climate change. It’s completely out of his ability and training to make any kind of reasoned, science based assessments. As Paul Homewood shows, GDP is up, rainfall is normal, agricultural output is up, life is better for Zambians than it was a decade ago. This rapture people have fallen into over “Climate Change” is a religious endeavor and identical to the religion of “Wokism”.
“I am a writer, activist and blogger on social and environmental issues.
I grew up in Madagascar and Kenya, and moved back to Britain on completing high school. I studied journalism, international relations and cultural studies, and now live in Luton, UK.
My diverse portfolio of work includes books, research, activism, and freelance projects with organisations such as Oxfam, RSPB, Tearfund and WWF. My blog, The Earthbound Report, has twice been recognised as Britain’s leading green blog.
I am committed to practicing what I write about, and am constantly experimenting with sustainable living ideas. This has included a long term project to make my home zero carbon, a scheme for growing food in unused spaces around the town, and – to my family’s dismay – an ongoing curiosity about insect-based foods.”
Sounds like he spent much of his working life as what my sister calls a “non-profit parasite.”
i wonder if the author prefers farm or free range cockroaches?
Farm. He raises them in his apartment.
It’s easy. Never wash the dishes or take out trash. Greasy pizza boxes are the favored food. Soon you’ll have all the cockroaches you care to eat. Selling the excess is another matter.
“make my home zero carbon”
Practically impossible. He should also remove all items made previously with the help of fossil fuels, certainly all plastic, any food made with the help of diesel burning tractors/trucks, and clothes with polyester fibers, etc., etc.
if he installs solar panels, he’ll have to buy carbon credits to account for the coal burned in
China, to make the panels
The new ideology has it that whiteness is original sin and must be atoned for. Leading the woke charge is Auntie BBC
“The BBC rarely misses an opportunity to broadcast its wokeness. Execs at the corporation seem to come up with new right-on initiatives every week – from gender-balanced panel shows to ‘allyship training’ for production staff, from spending millions on diversity to slapping trigger warnings on older, politically incorrect programmes.
…
I had wanted to include a quotation from ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. They said no, you cannot refer to that song because it is racist (at the beginning, there is a black porter). This is now a well-known, established forbidden area – you cannot do ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’.
…
For the 500th episode, I wanted to include the lyrics, ‘In Bengal, to move at all, is seldom, if ever, done’, which comes from ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ by Noël Coward. No, I was told by the executive, because the song represents colonial attitudes. “
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/14/the-bbc-is-systemically-woke/
The BBC injects identity politics into everything in its output. It does the same with its climate crisis narrative.
The two coinciding with and reinforcing each other is no surprise.
But is the BBC now erasing women? Maybe JK Rowling can advise?
“Climate change ‘impacts women more than men'”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43294221
I’ve just re-read the lyrics to the “Chatanooga Choo Choo”. I don’t see any racial references unless they are claiming that when they sing “pardon me boy”, they are talking to a black person. At no point in the song is “boy” identified.
I was told by a leftist years ago, that if it’s possible to interpret anything in a racial way, you must interpret it that way. Failure to do so is just an attempt to excuse racism.
Another young leftist told me that all whites are racist, the only difference is that some are open about it, and some try to hide it. If you dig deeply enough, you can always expose the racism.
Actually it’s pretty clear that the “boy” in question is a shoeshine boy. (“…boy you can give me a shine”)
It’s a stretch to assume that the shoeshine boy was actually an adult black man being disrespected by being called a boy. But that’s what we do these days—stretch to make everything have a racial angle.
Is it not inherently racist to refer to some people as “White,” as though the color of their skin alone defines them? Is a person with white skin, born and raised by a Black couple racist? Perhaps so, because albinos in Africa are often persecuted. The real racists are those who make an issue of the color of someone’s skin, rather than recognizing their qualities as a human.
if it’s possible to interpret anything in a racial way, you must interpret it that way. Failure to do so is just an attempt to excuse racism.
They left out the part about “unless it’s coming from a leftist”
Let’s not pik nitz shall we? Or beat about the bush
(Maybe we better had Beat The Bush while we’ve still got any bushes left to beat)
What was the Skin Tone of the folks who:
IOW:Who turned 1/3rd of all the land surface on This Earth to desert and left only biting stinging dangerous and poisonous critters roaming what’s left?
Where would we all be now if they hadn’t?
Next, who exactly has developed, built and put into daily use the Technology that could repair all that destruction….if only contemporary folks would quit counting dancing angels, seeing pretty patterns in clouds and arguing about phlogiston
Or get off their backsides, away from their reflections in computer screens and learn to drive either: a back-hoe loader, a quarry-sized dump truck or a tractor.
Always remembering that: The only racists there are, are the ones who notice.
The BBC noticed….
Leftists seem to believe that wealth just appears out of thin air.
That’s not true. Hillary worked very hard at cornering the US uranium market.
the fear of third world development into modern,clean, educated, society is palpable among the Greenerati. They are the racists, they do not to bring the third world into the modern world, They want the quaint, ignorant villagers to make their crafts, have tourist pictures taken, and just die off, so they can get back on their business Jets and go back to Davos for their ski trip…
Jeremy Williams’ main problem is that he’s a nutcase.
Perhaps more to the point, why is the BBC not pointing out that the greatest perpetrator of this racist oppression of the poorer inhabitants of New Orleans and other cities is China. China after all is the leading emitter of CO2, with India doing its level best to catch up.
Why should we tolerate this disgusting oppression by the racist Chinese of our Black fellow citizens? That is the question we should be asking.
I would like to apologise to many tribes across the South Globe (I never knew that such a phrase existed) for denying them the right to keep on fighting each other with spears, bows and arrows, and poisoned darts and cannibalising each other and adding a 100ppm of CO2 to their atmosphere.
The Cs in IPCC stand for Circus and Clowns.
Mulako Kabisa, Zambian climate scientist says
“the biggest impact has been increased temperature and reduced rainfall, resulting in climate shocks that include droughts and floods”
Huh? Reduced rainfall causes drought AND floods?
Yes. It rains less, but all of the rain is concentrated in one area because climate change altered the rainfall patterns. It’s the worst of both worlds and it’s worse than we thought. Zambia’ poorest are hardest hit.
Zambia’s
Personally, I’m more concerned about propaganda being promoted by the mainstream Media, along with ‘wokism,’ and TV entertainment being turned into diversity showcases. It is getting to where I really can’t relate to the shows I see on TV except for the nature documentaries. It is, fortunately, difficult to promote inverse racism when following the life cycle of a black bear, a polar bear, or (all bases covered) penguin. Although, emperor penguins might be accused of white-black privilege.
Climate change and racism are two of the biggest frauds of the 21st Century.
Emperor penguins can also be accused of cultural imperialism.
Dude, it’s right there in their name!
There is only one human race as proven by modern DNA analysis.
All persons who use the term “racist” as reasoning or justification for their arguments are not “following the science”.
They are instead using disproven and archaic19th century belief systems.
It’s so hard to keep up with trends in wokery. Last year, it was apparently a racist thing to refer to black people as “black” – you had to use the word “Black”. This BBC article repeatedly uses “black” and “Black” doesn’t appear once.
What can we learn from this?
“Climate change and racism are two of the biggest challenges of the 21st Century.”
Both 21st century crises manufactured by progressives.
Good job I stopped watching the BBC & stopped paying my licence fee. The BS Broadcasting Corporation. We now learn that the licence fee is going to be abolished thank goodness.
What? A perfectly good tax eliminated only about three decades after it made no sense anymore? How can it be? More evidence of Boris Johnson trashing the UK I suppose. What is the 10x bigger tax that you’ll be paying as a replacement for the revenue?
Defund the BBC now! Make George Soros pay for that disgusting propaganda … not the taxpayers!
The BBC used to be synonymous with spreading the truth. Now it is synonymous with lies and propaganda.
As an American, I’m perplexed. Does the BBC have an absolute monopoly on all television and radio broadcasts? That’s my impression. How did this come to be? Is there no movement toward capitalist, free-market broadcast outlets? If not, why not?
No it doesn’t. The BBC runs 3 of the 50 odd channels I can watch on the Freeview system. It’s biggest competitor is the ITV franchise with 4 main channels, there are regional broadcasters, arti channels and channels regurgitating old stuff. However, one can only watch one at the time.
question…is Zambias output up because UK and EU and russian corps have gopt farms there to send the produce back home? does seem to happen way too much, they buy the land block local access to rivers lakes water etc and employ a meagre local or bring their own workers mechanise most and the actual residents still starve.
and then throw in the par for course hands out local govt ripping whats left off their own people
Climate justice or injustice are terms that, when uttered, illustrate the ignorance or malfeasance of the speaker. Climate is a natural phenomenon governed by physical laws of energy flow. While humanity may have some transient mild impact on climate the evidence is scant.
Justice is a wholly human construct that has no foundation in the natural world. It is something we all seem to value but would find hard to define in a universally acceptable way. But still the goal of justice is a mission that helps tie society together provides some form of common purpose. Climate and justice have almost exactly nothing to do with each other.
This is the world we live in now where those who would drive change in society try to use “science” as a fungible concept to support their preferred policy, economy, governance and value systems where there is a wide diversity of opinions differing from their own. Essentially their beliefs systems rather than facts and observations drive their muttering and science is just a seasoning they use on their word salad without understanding. Nothing short of getting their way over the objections and best interests of others will satisfy them. By definition it is the opposite of justice they seek – it is tyranny.
Hmmm. Changes in temperature. Has anyone ever looked at the changes in temperature in Zambia? I wonder what it shows?
Maybe this chart will help.