The Climate Agenda Is Collapsing—Will The Global Poor Finally Be Heard?

Calling them wasteful and a threat to America’s sovereignty, freedoms, and prosperity, President Trump pulled the United States out of 66 international organizations – most importantly the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundation for “climate crisis” treaties and policies. [some emphasis, links added]

He also withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, vetoed US attendance at the 2025 COP30 climate conference, and revoked multiple costly regulations based on “climate crisis” claims.

Dozens of banks have withdrawn from the Net Zero Banking Alliance. At this year’s World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, climate action, renewable energy, and sustainable development received little attention from the wealthy political, corporate, and financial elites who populate the WEF.

(However, it’s quite possible that the WEF is simply going into stealth mode, using its “financialization of nature” concept to “treat ecosystems as assets,” dollarize them, and set the stage for the “international community” or UN to replace local, state, and national decision-making on development.)

Bill Gates now says climate change is not a crisis, and the world must focus on improving lives, healthcare, and living standards for the world’s poorest people, especially by ensuring they have plentiful, dependable, affordable energy, which only coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear can provide.

Running counter to these trends, Western Europe is still committing economic suicide – or more accurately, its elites are committing economic and real manslaughter against the poor and working classes.

But meanwhile, China, India, Indonesia, and other recently impoverished and still developing countries are increasingly using fossil fuels to lift millions, even billions, out of poverty, disease, and despair. African and other nations are eager to follow – and tell Western climate scolds to buzz off.

Winter Storm Fern caused dozens of deaths across the United States. Hundreds of thousands went hours or days without electricity, mostly due to ice breaking power lines amid days-long frigid temperatures.

But every year, in still-poor countries, nearly 750 million people still have no access to electricity – 600 million in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Billions more have minimal, sporadic access. They subsist in permanent or rolling blackouts.

Not dozens, but millions of them die every year.

From indoor air pollution that comes from burning wood, charcoal, grass, and dung, because they don’t have natural gas, propane, or electricity for cooking and heating.

From bacteria and parasites in their water and food, because they don’t have electricity, water treatment, or refrigeration. From malaria and other diseases, because their substandard clinics and hospitals lack electricity, clean water, sufficient vaccines and antibiotics, and even window screens.

In short, due to being deprived of energy, sound governance, vibrant economies, and jobs. And to global fixations on the “climate crisis” and “ridding the world of fossil fuels,” instead of meeting their needs.

It’s equally abominable that the legacy news media, academia, and “human rights stalwarts” largely ignore those basic needs – while they incessantly bash the United States, Israel, and Western culture.

Global financial institutions are no better, including the World Bank and assorted Multilateral Development Banks, including the Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and even the African Development Bank.

They remind me of Saint Augustine: let us embrace and promote development – but not yet, not too much, and not with fossil fuels.

Indeed, most of them still refuse to finance little more than wind, solar, and other “renewable energy” projects. They impose Carbon Colonialism, poverty, disease, and death on poor families, with self-righteous morality and feigned concern about the human tolls.

In 2015, President Obama launched his Power Africa initiative, telling African audiences this was their opportunity to “leapfrog over dirty energy and immediately go to clean energy.”

For a short while, the African Development Bank seemingly broke from this crowd, voicing muted support for coal and gas power generation.

“Africa must develop its energy sector with what it has,” AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina said in 2017 – renewable energy and the continent’s vast coal, oil, and gas resources, most of which remain untapped or are exported.

Ignoring fossil fuels is unsustainable, intolerable, and immoral – as is the absurd reality that, excluding South Africa, per capita power consumption in Africa is around 660 kWh per annum, compared to an average 6,000 kWh in Europe and 12,500 kWh in the USA.

Thankfully, more countries are freeing themselves from “progressive” Western shackles. However, since 2017, the AfDB has stopped funding new coal projects and restricted oil and gas drilling and production.

Abundant, reliable, affordable baseload electricity for Africa seems to have again given way to climate politics, though the changing global tide initiated by President Trump may alter that yet again.

Meanwhile, though, China, India, and other countries now realize that coal and hydrocarbons are the sine qua non of prosperity, employment, health, and political and strategic power.

As energy and science researcher Vijay Jayaraj recently noted, 460 coal plants are under construction worldwide, another 500 have permits or soon will, and 260 more new coal-fired power plants could be announced soon.

Oil and gas are also growing in importance as fuels and raw materials. Wind and solar are add-ons but can never replace coal, hydrocarbons, or nuclear power.

The vast majority of the coal plants are in China and India, with Indonesia and other nations also surging ahead – building reliable generation for affordable electricity, securing supply lines, and drilling and mining their way out of dependence on foreign supplies.

They’re also following the path that Europe, the United States, and other nations took to become developed and wealthy. Every investment in new power generates industries, jobs, tax revenues, and more money for future investments.

Free enterprise financing, invention, inspiration, perspiration, and production – with essential, non-stifling government regulation – remain the fastest, surest way forward.

Simply put, the world doesn’t need some “miracle of prosperity.” It needs to eradicate the anti-miracle tragedy of continued poverty. There is simply no reason poverty should continue, or that prosperity should not be found everywhere.

Books, courses, and the internet enable every politician and citizen to learn what technologies are available, what they’ve accomplished, and how to achieve health and prosperity.

These resources also bear witness to the failures across Europe and other countries that have sent living standards back 50-100 years, and sentenced their citizens to energy deprivation, joblessness, and dying because they can no longer afford proper heating and air conditioning or even nutritious food, due to misplaced devotion to climate and renewable energy ideologies.

We might call this the Reverse-Midas Effect: everything climate alarmists touch turns to lead, which brings lead poisoning, developmental delays, learning and behavioral problems, memory dysfunction, even comas and death. In people and nations.

Governments and institutions must support basic human rights of access to abundant, reliable, affordable energy to support modern living standards. Not free, but access to that energy.

They must stop financing the WEF, UN, World Bank, and other institutions that often despise America and support only such health and living standards as wind and solar power can provide.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, economic development, and human rights.