Paul Driessen

Will We Allow Eco-Imperialism To Block Development?

This is the edited transcription of the pre-recorded remarks delivered by Mr. Paul Driessen to the Schiller Institute conference on September 5. He is a Senior Policy Advisor to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). Subheads have been added.

Let me share some important thoughts with you, about lethal eco-imperialist policies that are being imposed on billions of poor people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America by rich, powerful, callous radicals in developed countries.

The chasm between modern, industrialized nations and still-impoverished countries is as shocking as it is unnecessary and intolerable. But the reasons for that chasm—and what can and must be done to eliminate it—are readily available for anyone who wants to discover them, for anyone who wants to use that knowledge to dramatically improve lives and living standards in all those still impoverished countries.

Impoverished countries need freedom to function, create and build responsibly, under reasonable, responsible laws and regulations.

They need to eradicate diseases that kill people and make them unable to work for weeks or even months.

To do that, they need doctors, nurses, modern clinics and hospitals, clean water, insecticides, medicines—homes and buildings with doors and window screens to keep disease carrying insects out.

They need abundant, nutritious food—through modern agriculture and the seeds and other technologies that produce more crops, from less land, using less water, with less backbreaking labor, and are able to survive locust and other insect plagues.

Perhaps more than anything else, they need energy—especially electricity—abundant, reliable, affordable energy from coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric sources.

Those countries need to recognize that expensive, intermittent, unreliable, insufficient energy—from millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of backup batteries—requires a hundred times more raw materials, mining, land use, habitat destruction and wildlife decimation than those now hated coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric sources.

Each of these steps and components creates jobs, incomes, prosperity, health and better, more productive lives—that multiply and multiply over time.

In fact, all these things are fundamental human rights.

I’m talking about the fundamental human right of access to these modern technologies. The fundamental right for all human lives to be improved and blessed the way ours have been. The fundamental human right to never be denied access to these technologies.

A Dark and Evil Force

So what is holding these impoverished nations back? Inertia and inaction, sure. Corruption, certainly. But there is another factor, a dark and evil force throwing roadblocks in their way.

That dark, evil force is the veritable army of rich, powerful government agencies and non-governmental organizations—NGOs—that lie, pressure, harass and intimidate families, businesses and entire countries into doing nothing, into rejecting modern technologies, into settling for minuscule improvements in their lives and living standards only at the margins.

These pressure groups use their vast wealth, prestige, power—and control over trade, loans and technology transfers—to perpetuate poverty, disease, malnutrition and death. It’s eco-manslaughter.

And yet they get lionized and even canonized, for supposedly protecting Mother Earth. The NGOs enjoy tax-exempt status and global prestige, because the horrific human and environmental costs of their actions are mostly ignored by news media, celebrity, human rights and other supposed watchdogs.

Maybe even worse, they are financed by taxpayers—and by super-wealthy, supposedly charitable foundations—many of which got their billions of dollars from fortunes made in the same industries and technologies that they now deny to poor families and countries.

What they are doing is akin to denying cancer patients access to chemotherapy, because they are concerned about possible side effects. They would rather see the patients die, than allow them to suffer hair loss or depressed immune systems.

As though it’s their decision, instead of the cancer patient’s.

But it’s even worse. Because the supposed side effects of the modern technologies that these powerful NGOs, government agencies and international anti-development banks are denying to impoverished families and countries are mostly exaggerated or fabricated.

They exist in their imaginations, computer models, press releases and fund-raising appeals. Not in reality.

These pressure groups won’t even let families get Golden Rice—which could prevent 500,000 children from going blind and 250,000 from dying every single year from Vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition.

These radical agencies, foundations, banks and NGOs are committing crimes against humanity. They are perpetrating and perpetuating millions of deaths every year—millions of poor, dead, dark-skinned parents and children—at the hands of mostly rich, white radicals in wealthy developed countries.

These cold-blooded eco-imperialists should be condemned for crimes against humanity and racist eco-manslaughter. They should lose their funding and tax-exempt status.

They should be banned from college campuses and polite civil society. They should be hauled before the UN Human Rights Commission and International Court of Justice.

All of you at this conference could help make this happen. You could turn this dark, evil paradigm on its head. You could help bring a new birth of freedom, health and prosperity to dozens of countries—and billions of people—around the world.

I hope you will join me and my colleagues in making it happen. Thank you.

Follow Mr. Driessen on Townhall.com, WattsUpWithThat.com and CFACT.org.