(MISES) – Mere days prior to its receiving renewed attention because of an ongoing civil war, Sudan and many other African countries were (and still are) being promoted by news organizations as citadels of suffering. Viewers are subjected to heart-wrenching images: The gaunt, skeletal bodies of starved children crying out in hunger. Families left with only emaciated cows, selling sticks to produce some kind of livelihood. After observing these agonizing spectacles, the only logical question anyone could ask is, why does this poverty exist?
Fortunately, the impeccably informative news sites are quick to relieve us of this uncertainty. “Climate change” is the answer, they declare. Not “global warming” but the new existential threat of human-caused climate change has resulted in an increase in water levels, leading to accentuated poverty in Sudan and the greater African region, and this justifies a sizable increase in government spending in the area.
One need not look too far to discover that this reasoning is filled with both logical and factual errors. To begin with, famines and poverty have been the norm in society since time immemorial, certainly before any accusations of climate change were leveled at humanity in general and the West in particular. Indeed, the West, until quite recently in human history, was one of the main victims of extreme famines. Before the 1700s, people in England and the West lived in constant fear that they would be struck with a poor growing season and famine, forcing them to go hungry through the next year.
