Climate Hysteria, Economic Development and Energy in Eelam
Ruben Nagesparan Chandrakumar, BS
The climate change movement, often characterized by hysteria and a blind insistence on certainty of outcome, has become reliant on a narrative that positions its proponents as heroes within a global apocalypse. While environmental issues have always existed and must be treated seriously with a great deal of caution, the insistence that all countries should immediately limit their ambitions to achieve net-zero carbon emissions is absurd beyond belief.
Perhaps no one symbolizes this movement more than Greta Thunberg, who believes that the world will face unthinkable consequences if all countries do not restructure their entire economies and energy use within the coming years. This narrow-minded approach has had, and will continue to have, terrible consequences for the world.
While the developed countries of the world—who were able to develop due to their use of fossil fuels and massive energy consumption—lecture poorer nations on net-zero policies and prioritizing the climate, impoverished countries struggle to survive and develop enough to avoid death from starvation, malaria, and other preventable causes. This insistence by developed nations, particularly in the West, on prioritizing climate change above all other issues in the political and economic arena is blatant hypocrisy, considering their dependence on Russian and Saudi Arabian oil.
There are two immediate and long-term impacts of this on impoverished nations like Eelam. The first is that economic opportunities, the ability to use fossil fuels to quit burning wood and generate economic growth, and the ability to integrate energy use for household and corporate needs would be significantly weakened—if not eliminated. This would doom the nation to poverty, and the high cost of renewables would make it virtually impossible to integrate an energy system accessible to anyone but the wealthy. The second effect would be that the most impoverished individuals would be more vulnerable to health issues, a lack of economic opportunities, and a substantially higher likelihood of death.
The best path forward, in the face of the environmental issues countries and humanity face, is to continue investment and development within renewables to make them more efficient and cheaper while using inexpensive energy to lift the impoverished countries of the world—instead of penalizing them for seeking economic growth and the comforts provided by affordable energy.