The Climate Change debate is taking lots of twists and turns, but none more strange than those blaming the weather for the hardship of many poor people.
In an article for CNN, Ms. Katharina Rall, a research fellow with the health and human rights division at Human Rights Watch, proffers that a group of indigenous people in Kenya, I assume a remote village, have to traverse ever greater distances in search of clean water.
The gist is, this looking for potable water causes the school children to spend less time studying so the Paris Climate Conference should solve this problem and provide water and sanitation facilities to address these “rights”.
These are difficult circumstances for sure, but, (you knew there was a but in there didn’t you?) Professor Don Boudreaux points out in his blog, Cafe Hayek, that this does not highlight problems caused by climate change and suggests The Worst Environmental Calamity Is The Absence of Capitalism.
He notes this:
“…highlights problems caused by the failure of some peoples to embrace norms and policies that unleash market-driven economic growth.
“All the perils and travails that Ms. Rall mentions – from inadequate access to clean water and sanitation to long dreary hours of backbreaking work – were routinely suffered by nearly everyone on earth before the industrial revolution. Filth, hunger, short life expectancy, illiteracy, subjugation of women, sanguinary conflicts over scarce resources – these horrors are not the recent consequences of climate change. They are the ages-old consequences of persistent and widespread poverty. This poverty and its accompanying miseries were eliminated only when and only where people embraced the very economic system that so many of today’s environmentalists wish either to abolish outright or to jeopardize with unprecedented government-fashioned fetters: entrepreneurial capitalism.”
It’s no secret at this late stage that all humans lived in similar circumstances until the industrial revolution, but articles like those of Ms. Rall never articulate these facts, conveniently leaving them out.
I wonder why none of the recipients of the international aid dollars distributed around the world have ever figured out how to get water to arid regions?
