Essay by Eric Worrall
Extreme poverty and vulnerability to adverse weather will be a thing of the past, if everyone participates in exploitation of fossil fuel.
Climate change is not just a problem of physics but a crisis of justice
Friederike Otto
Fri 18 Apr 2025 19.00 AESTIn an exclusive extract from Friederike Otto’s new book, she says climate disasters result from inequality as well as fossil fuel.
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So how does weather become a disaster?
We can’t say exactly how the effects of climate change vary by location and type of weather, but what is absolutely clear is that the more people are in harm’s way and the more vulnerable they are, the greater their risk.
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For example, one of our studies from 2021 showed that the food insecurity linked to the drought in southern Madagascar was caused mainly by poverty, a lack of social structures, and heavy dependence on rainfall, but not by human-induced climate change. Nevertheless, just as with the Nigerian floods, international reports talked only of the weather and climate. The international media barely mentioned that, in fact, the local infrastructure, which had remained unfinished for decades, played a decisive role in the disastrous drought.
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But it always proves true that the people who die are those with little money who can’t readily obtain all the help and information they need. And that doesn’t have to be the case, no matter where they are.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/18/climate-change-is-not-just-a-problem-of-physics-but-a-crisis-of-justice
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The above was taken from an excerpt of Frederike’s book “Climate Injustice”, which will be available from the 24th April.
I left a fair bit out in the quotes above, most of the guardian book excerpt in my opinion is social justice gibberish.
But when you cut away the obligatory assertions of white male dominated climate science and complaints about colonial exploitation of the Global South, the central point seems clear. Weather disasters, climate driven or not, are mostly a problem for poor people. Rich societies can afford advance tornado and typhoon warnings, flood mitigation, rescue operations, fast personal transport on good roads, insurance, alternative accommodation and food imports to cover crops lost to adversity.
The good news is Africa is already addressing their poverty problem, by massively ramping up exploitation of fossil fuel resources.
Granted a lot of the profit from such activity will end up in the beloved leader’s Swiss bank account or be distributed to his Wabenzi cronies, but you can’t have economic activity on that scale without local workers getting their hands on some of the money. For projects on this scale, it is always cheaper to train locals with low wage expectations than to import 10s of thousands of expensive foreigners. Even the UN admits the African fossil fuel boom is driving rapid economic growth.
An important benefit of all this economic growth is it will foster the development of civil society and will eventually increase people’s resilience and ability to survive climate disasters – just as it did in the West. If nothing else, better weather forecasting and flood management will be essential to protect the fossil fuel infrastructure.
The message seems clear – if you want poor people to become more resilient to weather disasters, climate driven or otherwise, you can help by buying their oil, gas and coal exports.
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What the article is saying is that Africa and most of the developing world has seen the light regarding the value of fossil fuel development and utilization for economic growth and poverty alleviation and aims to exploit it. Meanwhile too many in developed nations have been shown the same light for decades now but are regarding it with blinkers. Hence their promotion of renewable and undependable alternate energies like wind and solar.
Seems like they could try importing MS-13.
So in Africa they want to live like Europe and in Europe a lot of believers want us to live like a poor African.
“The message seems clear – if you want poor people to become more resilient to weather disasters, climate driven or otherwise, you can help by buying their oil, gas and coal exports.”
I always found it odd how left-wing Western media would usually blame droughts or floods and the like for the constant famine conditions in North Korea, for instance. By their logic, the weather “disasters” somehow always spared South Korea and Manchuria, and only impacted poor North Korea. Everyone with a functional brain knows why North Koreans are starving. Similar factors are impacting other parts of the world, and the obvious answer is industrialization with fossil fuels and nuclear energy (when they’re ready).
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
― Robert Heinlein
Telling poor nations that they cannot use any fossil fuels also significantly increases their bad luck.
Heinlein and the other 50s SF realists liked phrases like “the normal condition of man”.
Young people in Western nations don’t realize that they are the most privileged people ever to live on this planet. And the only thing they do is to complain.
Yes, that’s the message, but it has not always been well received
Sort of what Bjorn Lomborg’s been advocating for 30 years.
Agreed, but we should not “exploit” these.
We should be prepared to pay a fair price and to help those countries develop their own domestic infrastructure.
The price is determined by supply and demand, not by fiat.
Socialism never works. That’s why the West is in economic decline and many live in energy poverty.
“But it always proves true that the people who die are those with little money who can’t readily obtain all the help and information they need.”
And the rich live forever? 😉
No, generally just longer
I don’t think I could trust anyone who pierces their eyebrow.
When I was a kid an African was exposed as someone with a bone in their nose; but today much of the liberal west can be seen with 6 or 7 facial punctures and assorted hardware to prove they are as ill informed as the tribes of 300 years ago.
The first sign you are dealing with a loon, piercings and mismatched earrings.
Typical jingoism of climate catastrophists, as they are Marxists.
The solution is freedom: https://ourworldindata.org/famines?fbclid=IwY2xjawJxxZBleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHso3Ic1MhpFeB6RKKVgBqAS9mmCTnxSoY4NB_qhDCuZK7VcrpHN7RNTRKM12_aem_DH1q9FvA44nlDFztnOyVGw
(Fossil fuels sure help transport food to people in need.)
Construction helps – Bangladesh built shelters that people could move inland thus up to. But oh! all that CO2 emitted in making concrete. 😉
Climate change ideology is not just an abomination of science but an attack on humanity.