Energy, Poverty and Terrorism
We often talk about the imperative to bring electrification to the rural parts of the developing world. Energy is a gateway to education, and education is a gateway to prosperity, environmental conservation, as well as stronger and smaller families. This is an extremely important thing here in the 21st century, as our population is in the process of quintupling from two billion in 1950 to ten billion in 2050.
What we haven’t covered, however, is that global poverty is more than human agony, overpopulation, and environmental destruction; it’s also a breeding ground for terrorists. Suffering people desperate for their basic physical needs to be met (food, water, comradeship, etc.) are readily drawn into ISIS and other terrorist groups that offer these benefits. Terrorist organizations offer immediate gratification, which, as appealing as it may be to some of us in the West, is a hundred times more powerful to those who are suffering disease, dehydration, malnutrition, living in squalid conditions–suffering every minute of their lives.
This is something for us to think about when we see the ascendance of progressives like Bernie Sanders; he makes a big deal out of income inequality and the fact that there are 85 people on this planet who have more net worth than the bottom 3.5 billion.
It’s simply not sustainable. And it may be terrorism that brings this point home with a thud on us previously lucky Westerners.
We live in a world of finite mineral, energy, water resources and growing human population that sees TV, internet advertising and has rising lifestyle expectations, and huge income inequality.
This is NOT sustainable.
It will take all the science, international cooperation, best ideas, ousting corruption,
fixing broken political systems, renewable energy and food systems etc we can muster to survive and flourish.
The root causes of the problems have to be fixed. Bandaids aren’t working.
Craig,
Not all terrorism is derived from poverty or even oppression. Terrorist are by and large misanthropes and misfits who ally themselves with extremist political and religious causes from a sense of insignificance and alienation.
it’s all too easy to identify “terrorists” as middle eastern fanatics, but the Irish fanatics of the IRA, the German members of Baader-Mienhof, Italian “red brigade” or Japan’s “Red Army Faction” or the obscure but deadly “Aum Shinrikyo” Japanese doomsday cult members all come from relatively privileged backgrounds.
The US has has it’s own share of home grown crazies and fanatics, including the murderous Uni bomber, Timothy McVeigh, Symbionese Liberation Army, and countless other self professed extremists.
Attacking the rich, may resonate with those poissessing only a rudimentary knowledge of economics, but reality is very different. Socialism and “wealth redistribution” sound attractive concepts and accord with simple moral philosophies.
In practice the implementation of such concepts, especially in a nation like the US, is neither attainable nor desirable. Just as Venezuela has discovered, it all eventually ends in tears !
In the UK, I have a neighbour who over a life time has acquired an art collection valued at over £200 million. But this isn’t wealth that can be redistributed ! People can’t eat paintings and sculpture, nor can it be divided. The only “value” is the ability of other wealthy individuals or institutions to purchase the artworks. If those wealthy persons or institutions no longer exist, the collection becomes valueless.
The image of the wealthy behaving like Walt Disney’s Scrooge McDuck and swimming in great piles of cash, is a childish fantasy. The rich are rich because they invest. Investment can be a risky business.
It takes a great deal of accumulated capital and surplus wealth to invest in high risk innovative projects and support the production of products requiring high labour costs and specialized craftsmanship.
Only by creating more wealth, and encouraging greater economic activity do nations and their populations escape poverty.
Societies obsessed with a “fair” distribution of the national “cake”, discover the cake getting smaller and the slices, although “fair”, become very meager indeed. On the other hand, economies that concentrate on enlarging the cake, while accepting a percentage of inequality in distribution, discover the cake grows larger and everyone receives a larger slice.
This is not to say that poverty isn’t a undesirable factor in any society, but the remedies can be very difficult to implement and often involve a certain amount of ‘economic colonialism”.
What is really unhelpful, and counter-productive is conscious driven idealistic, impractical “solutions’ that only produce more poverty and resentment.
Craig,
A couple of comments here:
First, the world population in 2015 was ~7.3 billion in 2015, not 10 billion.
Second, while Bernie spends some small portion of his speeches pointing out that there is extreme global inequality, the most important path toward reducing inequality over the past 30 years has been trade. Bernie spends most of his stump speeches lambasting the idea of trade – a tirade that virtually every economist on the planet agrees is misplaced and – for lack of a better word – pretty stupid.
We’ve halved the number of people in extreme poverty in the world today as compared to 30 years ago because of trade. The only thing that would be more important as a means of reducing global poverty would be seriously promoting birth control, which unfortunately would, in many cases, require education to come first.
Yikes. 2015 was a typo; I meant 2050. I fixed that.
I agree with the rest of this. In fact, my only criticism of Bernie is that he does not seem to understand that commerce and prosperity are good things that need to be promoted with proper policy.
And yes, you’re most certainly right about education and population growth; that’s a point I make often.
It does not improve the lives of people when they loose their jobs because China, or some entity manufactures with children, pollutes, steals intellectual property, wages cyber attacks on other companies, pays workers less than it costs them to buy food….
There also need to be world wide pollution, and labor standards, and enforcement of intelectual property rights….
Getting the money out of pollitics, and equal media time and maybe not a winner take all political system need to happen.
Good luck I hope.
I fully understand the points you’ve made here. We live in extremely difficult and frightening times. Sometimes I find it hard to remain optimistic as well; all I can really do is just to keep fighting. I’m sure you feel the same.
Terrorism is a complex thing, and has a wide range of contributing factors. In the UK, notable factors which a large proportion of those recruited to terrorist camps appear to have in common is alienation from the wider society, and a history of involvement in gang or criminal activity.
In the developing world, in some cases those suffering from desperate conditions and inadequate / corrupt governance can become materially or ideologically attracted to extremists, and it has to be said that some of the trouble we see in the world now has deep roots for which Western powers bear some historic responsibility –
1. Centuries of slave trade in Africa – first Arabs then the European powers.
2. Deliberately racist policies of colonial powers – combined with a divide and rule mentality setting up lasting resentments which still resonate today.
The tensions between India and Pakistan can be interpreted at least in part as a symptom of British divide and rule policy in colonial times.
3. Proxy wars in which larger powers test their weaponry and strategies in conflicts between and within weaker countries.
Historically the US and USSR in Afganistan, several African nations, and various places in central and south America. More recently in Syria and Yemen between Iran and various Sunni Muslim nations.
4. Badly planned interventions in for the most part predominantly Muslim lands by powers with a Christian influenced cultural identity.
Why no Marshal plan in Iraq or Afganistan? why destroy essential infrastructure on a massive scale and leave whole populations without essential services such as clean water, basic health care, electricity or modern communications long after the initial fighting is over.
What of war crimes carried out by Western powers – such as the torture in Abu Grebe, almost certainly sanctioned very high up in the then US administration, but for which only relatively low ranking soldiers were ever called to account? (Not withstanding conviction in absentia by a Malaysian court in 2012 of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others for war crimes in regards to extraordinary rendition.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31297.htm
Whilst I would not put their actions in the same league as ISIS or Al Qaeda, a reasonable person can ask the question – is it any less terrorism to carry out torture, extraordinary rendition and similar actions or facilitate the same when you are a democratic leader than if you are a desperate rebel trying to overthrow a hated and corrupt leader?
I can think of no better way to recruit for the terrorist cause.
Wow, Gary. You’re quite a human being, in case no one’s ever told you that.
FWIW, I believe you’re 100% in everything you’ve written here.