The Greens against the Poor...

An interview with Paul Driessen, whose book Eco-Imperialism is a must read...

Taylor: You have been one of the leaders in presenting affluent Americans with information about how environmental extremists are impoverishing and imperiling the lives of the world's poorest people. What are the most significant threats the world's poor face from extremists?

Driessen: I think malaria is probably the biggest threat. There has been tremendous opposition among environmental activists regarding DDT and insecticides. The extremists focus on phony, speculative crises regarding insecticides, yet ignore the extreme and very real negative toll that so-called enlightened environmental policies are imposing on the poor people of the world.

Another threat to the world's poor are the proffered "solutions" to global warming, where alarmists use speculative scenarios cranked out on computers to justify policies that will cause tremendous harm to the world's poor.

People in underdeveloped nations desperately need energy, yet the alarmists want to keep it away from them. As a result, people in Third World nations frequently burn dung indoors for their cooking and heating requirements, and will continue to do so until the activists stop opposing fossil fuel use and hydroelectric dams.

Environmental activists frequently call for the installation of small solar panels or a couple of wind turbines in each local village, but these are wholly inadequate sources of power. These cannot give birth to a modern society.

The activists are even using global warming now to justify opposition to shipping food from Africa to Europe, arguing that transportation entails burning too many fossil fuels. This is trade protectionism under environmental garb.

Time and again, despite the rhetoric, Africans' interests are always dead last on the totem poll of environmental activist priorities. A lack of concern for the Third World poor is being masked by high-minded environmental slogans.

Other threats from environmental activists include opposition to mining, foreign corporate investment, and biotechnology.

In all of these issues, environmental activists oppose Third World rights to self-determination and prevent Africans from developing a middle-income consumer society like that of the Western world. Unfortunately, the stifling of a middle-income consumer society is not the inadvertent result of environmental activist policies, but quite often the desired result.