Irreconcilable Conflict (Part 2)
Lateral thinking on the recent UN International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion and energy constraints on the developing world.
“Wrong is where the right is found.” – Doomberg
In a recent Pro Tier presentation Lateral Thinking: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at One of Our Most Important Tools of Analysis, Doomberg describes the process by which they have correctly predicted outcomes that were not even on the radar at the time they were made. A good example was their call that Mark Carney would be the next Prime Minister of Canada prior to his name ever being mentioned as a replacement for Justin Trudeau, before prediction websites even had Carney’s name on the board.
According to Team Doomberg, “exploring things that are probably wrong but assuming they’re true is the hallmark of a lateral thinker.” Considering axioms that run completely contrary to conventional wisdom and linear thinking is an essential part of this process.
The conventional “climate change” axiom in the advanced world is that reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to “ensure” the protection of the climate system and the environment is the highest moral value, because “climate change” is “the greatest risk facing humanity” and “the developed world is suffering/will suffer the worst consequences.” The “mountain of scientific evidence” and the “scientific consensus” we are constantly reminded of is the only evidence necessary for that “truism.”
We offer a contrary axiom which holds that:
poverty is the greatest risk facing 7/8th of the world (mostly - but not exclusively - people in the “developing” world),
affordable, abundant, reliable, on-demand energy is required to escape that poverty,
“renewable” energy technology will never meet those characteristics or enable nearly 7 billion inhabitants of the developing world to reach Western living standards, and
Inhabitants of the developing world will soon come to these realizations and eventually do something about it.
The idea that developing nations are at greater risk from the damage caused by “anthropogenic climate change” than from the consequences of restrictions placed on their energy use as a solution to “climate change” is implicit in the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion. This is a luxury belief of western “environmentalists” and an absurd affront to billions around the world. For perspective, residents of countries like Benin, the “Democratic” Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Pakistan consume less electricity in an entire year than your refrigerator on a per capita basis.
For over 2 billion people, energy poverty translates to indoor cooking using biomass (wood, dung). The UN’s own Organ - the World Health Organization - says this leads to 3 million premature and avoidable respiratory deaths each year.
Lack of refrigeration has health and nutrition consequences for hundreds of millions, right here and now, not in the year 2050 or 2100. Lack of distributed electricity limits everything from economic opportunity and development to education, inordinately burdening women, and children. Indonesia and India contain over 20% of the world’s population, yet their per capita annual electricity use is still only 10% or less of that enjoyed by residents of the U.S.
U.S. annual per capita annual electricity consumption (over 12,000 kilowatt hours) is almost 8 times higher than people living in Guyana and Namibia. This reality is especially shameful given that, like the U.S., Guyana and Namibia have plenty of hydrocarbon energy at their disposal. Fortunately, that is about to change in Guyana.
Put differently, for most of the 7 billion people on earth, the medicine (constraints on the use of energy necessary to improve their living standards) is far worse than the disease (future damage from “climate change”). Reducing poverty today – a condition inescapable without access to affordable, reliable, abundant, on-demand energy – simply outweighs climate change fears tomorrow.
To traditional axiomatic climate thinking in the West, such a proposition seems impossible if not downright blasphemous. But despite the prevailing narrative, the results of the latest Afrobarometer survey document the disconnect between the West’s and the UN’s climate change priorities (obsessions?) and the actual concerns of the developing world.
“Climate change” does not even make the top ten list of problems among the citizens of nearly 40 African nations. The four highest ranked concerns (and at least six of the ten), all have a direct nexus to energy.
We believe that “the worm turns” when two thresholds are reached. The first is that the nearly 7 billion people living below the standards of virtually everyone reading this post recognize the rich world’s obsession with “net zero” eliminates their chances to achieve our living standards in their lifetimes. The second is when they come to understand that the sum of aid, grants, funding, and loans for “green energy finance, adaptation and mitigation, and loss and damage funds” will not come close to compensating them for the lost opportunity cost, economically and otherwise.
If (or when) the developing world decides that poverty reduction takes precedence over “climate change,” how might they overcome the traditional axiom’s policy inertia? With a little lateral thinking, the same process that brought this case to the ICJ in the first place could be used to flip the script.
Here, we see ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change not as a victory for climate activists, but rather as a playbook for the developing world. How might that look?
Key to this line of thinking is the Court’s specific reference to “legal obligations” under “international agreements” including “international human rights laws.” Untested is the legal question of whether the obligations under those human rights agreements take precedence over UN climate change agreements.
Several of the 31 Articles contained in the nearly fifty-year-old UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) explicitly connect human rights to living standards and the use of resources, both of which are inexorably linked to energy. For example:
Article 1:
1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.
Article 11:
1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right, recognizing to this effect the essential importance of international cooperation based on free consent.
Article 25:
“Nothing in the present Covenant shall be interpreted as impairing the inherent right of all peoples to enjoy and utilize fully and freely their natural wealth and resources.”
Similarly, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), an agreement in force since 1948, contains several relevant Articles dealing with human rights in this context.
Article 4, which states (emphasis added):
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child contains explicit obligations that cannot be reconciled with the consequences of the UN’s Paris Agreement witnessed in the developing world today:
Article 32
1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.
As they relate to the developing world, UN human rights agreements conflict with UN climate agreements. The three examples below merely scratch the surface yet demonstrate that the conflicts are irreconcilable.
· China is producing enormous amounts of solar panels - as a consequence of the West’s Paris Agreement commitments - with forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang Province, an explicit violation of Article 1 (self-determination) of the ICESCR and Article 4 (servitude/slavery) of the UDHR.
· Children digging for cobalt (some dying in tunnel collapses) as a result of the explosion in demand to feed the Chinese and western EV and battery supply chains over the last decade is both a consequence of the Paris Agreement and an explicit violation of the UN CRC Article 32 (on exploitation of children and hazardous work).
· The advanced world’s efforts to constrain the developing world’s use of its own hydrocarbon energy resources is both a consequence of the Paris Agreement and an explicit violation of the “living standards” and “natural wealth and resources” provisions in Articles 1, 11, and 25 of the ICESCR and Article 25 of the UDHR highlighted above.
The UN turns a blind eye to these clear human rights violations by implicitly holding the position that climate change is a greater moral obligation than lifting nearly 7 billion people out of poverty. We do not see that “axiom” as “sustainable.”
The UN recognizes 193 member states (countries). The International Monetary Fund lists 42 countries as “advanced economies.” The IMF’s 42 advanced economies have a combined population of just over 1.25 billion people. The remaining ~ 150 countries are home to approximately 7 billion people living below the standards of most people reading this post.
Remember the role Vanuatu and the Pacific Islands Forum played in the process that led to the recent ICJ Opinion. Using their legal standing as “States, they beseeched the UN General Assembly to pass the resolution calling on the ICJ to provide this Advisory Opinion.
ICJ’s Advisory Opinion says State parties have legal responsibility for failure to take aggressive action on climate. What if the ~150 parties representing 7/8th of the world’s population decided to question what obligations advanced nations might have for the consequences of taking aggressive action on climate at the expense of the world’s poor, and blatantly violating UN Human Rights international laws/treaties in the process? How might that look?
It could look like the same grassroots effort that began with students in Fiji and ended with the ICJ Advisory Opinion last week. But driven by our axiom, not the prevailing one.
A group of African, Southeast Asian, and Latin America developing countries, having finally recognized that the medicine is worse than the disease, and reducing poverty as a higher moral value than reducing CO2 emissions, rally other developing countries to that sea change in philosophical approach. Banding together, they push the UN General Assembly to request an ICJ Opinion to an entirely different but highly relevant set of questions. For example:
We, the undersigned States and people, call on the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution requesting that the ICJ provide an Advisory Opinion on the following questions:
“(a) Having constrained the production and consumption of the undersigned States’ and Parties’ energy resources through their climate-related acts or omissions, what are the obligations of the advanced States under international laws to ensure the undersigned States and Peoples our rights of self-determination, to freely pursue our economic, social and cultural development, to freely dispose of our natural wealth, and to enable a standard of living on par with the advanced States?
(i) Do these obligations of States under international human rights laws take precedent over the obligations of States to ensure the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases enshrined in international climate change treaties?
(b) What are the legal consequences under these obligations for advanced States where they, by their acts and omissions, have caused significant harm to the undersigned developing States and Peoples and individuals by constraining their access to affordable, abundant, reliable, on-demand energy thereby harming the undersigned’s rights to self-determination, to freely pursue our economic, social and cultural development, to freely dispose of our natural wealth and resources, and to enable a standard of living on par with the advanced States under existing human rights agreements?
We close by noting that this line of lateral thinking is likely fraught with a variety of legal hurdles, not to mention the obvious political difficulty. But, as we noted in Sacrificing Humanity on the Green Altar in late 2022, a clue that such questions are stewing under the surface in developing nations was provided by Ugandan President Museveni just prior to the UN COP 27 climate conference (emphasis added):
"We will not accept one rule for them and another rule for us. Europe's failure to meet its climate goals should not be Africa's problem. It is morally bankrupt for Europeans to expect to take Africa's fossil fuels for their own energy production but refuse to countenance African use of those same fuels for theirs.”
This moral conflict is irreconcilable. It is not going away. The developing world is awakening to this realization.
There are promising signs. In 2017, the World Bank formally announced that it would end all financing for upstream oil and gas projects after 2019 (with some exceptional circumstances considered for the poorest countries). It has since blocked hydrocarbon project proposals in Nigeria, Angola, East Africa and elsewhere, while funding wind and solar projects (with “partners” like the Rockefeller Foundation) to the tune of billions in African and southeast Asian countries.
But after the World Bank (along with the G7) softened their position in 2023 to allow financing for natural gas projects in “energy poor” countries, this June the bank’s Board ended a long-standing ban on funding nuclear projects in developing countries. And the Board is considering whether to reverse its hydrocarbon energy ban to fund the production of natural gas in those countries as well.
Which countries have voiced opposition to the World Bank reconsidering its position on natural gas? Germany, France, and the UK (of course), the same triad of European nations that put climate change ahead of poverty and human rights at the UN in the first place.
The UN should be forced to address the irreconcilable moral conflict between the Paris Agreement and UN human rights agreements. It should declare poverty reduction and energy humanism the greater priority than reducing CO2 emissions. Its recent Advisory Opinion just showed the developing world exactly how it could do so. We’re looking at you, southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.
“Like” this post if you think the developing world’s living standards are a higher value and priority than reducing CO2 emissions.
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I certainly hope they take your advice and force the issue into the open. I want to see Antonio Guterres try to explain why the potential for something in 50 years' time is more critical than the lives of people living in poverty today.
Really great article. I never gave this stuff much thought until I read Alex Epstein’s book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. That opened my eyes to the many topics you covered in this piece.