Op-Ed: Real environmental crisis is not climate change
What if the worst environmental problem wasn’t the one everyone is talking about? While Western elites sip fair-trade coffee and obsess over carbon footprints, the developing world drowns in a toxic soup of its own making – a crisis entirely distinct from the phantom menace of climate change.
The real environmental emergency isn’t the modest warming that has helped humans thrive. It’s land degradation, poisoned water and other forms of pollution that are burying the Global South alive.
Yes, we’ve been fighting the wrong environmental war.
In Ghana, only one-quarter of the daily trash is gathered for disposal. Uncollected waste breeds insect vectors that transmit malaria and dengue fever. In South African townships, nearly three-quarters of the residents report diseases directly attributable to improper waste disposal. Cholera dominates the list.
In countries where capital is scarce and competing priorities numerous, this reallocation is consequential. Billions allocated to renewable energy transition in poor countries translates into delayed investment in wastewater treatment, sanitation systems and waste management technology.
Environmental ministers in developing nations have been socialized into a hierarchy of concern that places the atmospheric concentration of a botanical nutrient – carbon dioxide – above demonstrable health catastrophes unfolding in their jurisdictions.
The justification for this abysmal stance is rooted in the claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) is causing a climate crisis. The premise that this trace gas drives dangerous global warming is unscientific. The “settled science” is anything but.
Every time a city in India or Bangladesh floods, the media shrieks “climate change!”, blaming the rain on the burning of fossil fuels. This is a lie. The rain is real, but the cause of the disaster is fabricated. Analysis of Indian flood deaths show repeatedly that urban planning failures are the culprit.
Recent assessment by the U.S. Department of Energy acknowledges that excessively aggressive mitigation policies targeting CO₂ are likely more detrimental than beneficial to economic welfare. The scientific case for treating CO₂ as a planetary menace has weakened as observational data and physical modeling have matured.
And the irony is that the fossil fuels proposed for abandonment are needed to solve the real problems: High-temperature incinerators, recycling plants and water treatment facilities require massive amounts of reliable, affordable baseload power. Solar and wind cannot provide this.
The longer developing nations remain entranced by climate virtue signaling, the longer they defer the genuine environmental remediation their populations deserve.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.