Re: Darfur - It's the Jews AND Global Warming!
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Posted by Steve Majewski on 10:47:29 2007/04/09
In Reply to:
Re: Darfur - It's the Jews! Jimmy Carter agrees! posted by Lorraine
Eco-Janjaweed
Peter Foster
Financial Post
Saturday, April 07, 2007
One of the key claims of climate-change activists is that changes will affect the poor most, as indicated yet again in yesterday's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It will allegedly not merely do so directly, but also by inciting violence. Stressed humans will fight like rats in a cage for dwindling resources. This is not just a prospect, they say; it is happening now. Specifically, the genocide in Darfur is claimed to be the first "climate-change conflict."
Those who promote this view include aid activist and UN Global Compact guru Jeffrey Sachs, Malthusian doomster Lester Brown and Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the U.K's alarmist Stern review. But perhaps the most compelling--and revealing-- story on the issue comes not from these men, or from the IPCC, but in the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
In "The Real Roots of Darfur," Stephan Faris tells a gripping tale of anthropologist Alex de Waal travelling through the drought-stricken region in the mid-1980s and meeting a "bedridden and nearly blind Arab sheikh." The sheikh claimed to see signs and portents in the weather, which was allegedly causing unprecedented conflict between local herders and farmers.
"The God-given order was broken, the sheikh said." Fast-forward almost 20 years to 2003 and to camel-riding Janjaweed fighters raping, torturing and slaughtering Darfur's blacks. Who was their leader? The old sheik's son! According to Mr. Faris, "The aggression of the warlord ? can be traced to the fears of his father, and to how climate change shattered a way of life." In other words, don't blame this genocidal rapist, much less radical Islam. Climate change made him do it.
Darfur, according to Mr. Faris, is "a canary in the coal mine, a foretaste of climate-driven political chaos."
There is no doubt that climate change and ecological disaster stress populations, but the attempt to blame what is happening in Darfur on Western consumer society is tendentious, to say the least. Rwanda and worldwide Islamist aggression clearly indicate that the "root causes" of such violence lay elsewhere than in changes in the weather. Moreover, friction between pastoralists and farmers is age-old. The 19th century's U.S. "range wars" had nothing to do with climate change. Finally, humans are quite capable of causing ecological disaster all by themselves. Note the 1930s dust bowl and what the Soviet Union did to the Aral Sea.
At one time, the ecological disaster in Darfur and the Sahel region more generally was blamed entirely on overpopulation, deforestation and government restrictions on migration. Now some scientists claim that part of the problem may have been local climate variations. True as this may be, it begs a couple of leading questions: how far humans might be to blame for these changes, and thus morally responsible for rectifying them; and whether panglobal attempts to control climate are likely to help the world's poorest.
There is no denying Darfur's tragedy. It is estimated that upwards of 200,000 Darfurians have been killed and millions displaced by the Janjaweed militias. Sudan's government has not merely turned a blind eye to the killings but has promoted them. Other nations have been reluctant to intervene. Bold statements about "Responsibility to Protect" are meaningless unless somebody is prepared, essentially, to lead an invasion. Anybody naive enough to believe that this would be a simple matter might take a look at Iraq, where intervention was at least partly motivated by "moral" concerns about Saddam Hussein's genocidal activities.
In this context, trying to bring climate change into the equation only muddies the waters. Climate-change alarmists are presumably not suggesting that driving a Prius will end the conflict in Darfur, but they are suggesting that such actions will reduce the risks of Darfurs in the future. A more tangential approach to real human problems is hard to imagine.
Activists take the position that climate change is reversible by embracing a carbon-constrained world, which will thus be a greater promoter of peace and harmony. This is at best implausible; at worst outright dangerous. Whatever climate change may be about to throw at us, and to whatever degree capitalism is culpable, the best response is one of technology, flexibility and adaptability, all of which go with having free, wealthy and open societies.
The model of climate-change activists, however, is that we must be constrained in our freedoms and bureaucratically channelled in our innovations. It also suggests -- even more ridiculously -- that constraining wealth creation in developed countries can somehow be linked to promoting it in the rest of the world.
It is instructive that what is currently setting nation against nation is not climate change but the scramble over climate-change policy. Those worrying about the ability of poor people to feed themselves in the future might note that government promotion of corn-based ethanol is driving up prices and creating hardship right now. The problem is not "cars versus people," as suggested by the likes of Lester Brown; it is -- as ever -- governments versus people, just as it is in Darfur.
Our "moral obligation," meanwhile, is easy to preach, but difficult to put into practice. If we want to help the poor of the world, we should be encouraging freedom, trade and investment that does not wind up in the coffers of corrupt governments. The last thing we should be wasting resources upon is trying to change the weather. That's not just because such attempts are doomed to fail, but because they threaten to deliver us into the hands of an eco-Janjaweed, who -- like their counterparts in Sudan -- believe they are doing God's work against infidels.
© National Post 2007
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