By Jo Nova
It’s a cult
The latest ABC headline tells us that Climate Change is becoming a *major* driver of child marriage across Asia and the Pacific. All those super cyclones and floods (that never used to happen) are killing the family chickens, see, and poor mothers can’t afford to keep their daughters.
And you, evil sod, who drives a 6 cylinder ute, are to blame for all the young women sold as chattel and denied an education 5,000 miles away. Every time you turn the air conditioner on, another young life is ruined. Obviously.
But let’s not mention the data — where here in the West, the more CO2 we emitted, the older our brides got. Shh! It’s just a meaningless correlation.
The ABC tells us twelve million girls are tipped to become child brides this year. And child marriage is a global problem across cultures and religions, they say, helpfully not mentioning that there is at least one culture on Earth that hasn’t practiced arranged marriages for centuries. (And that would be the one that developed fossil fuels.)
In the empty space, the underlying ABC message is that culture is so meaningless, so unimportant, that whether your daughter marries at 12 or 22 is determined more by the weather.
It’s not that some cultures support socialist governments, corruption and crime, and that leads to crippling poverty and child marriage. No!
Once again, the ABC gets a billion dollars to miss the main point. The Christian West developed free markets, free speech and fossil fuels. And the capitalist West grew rich through coal, oil and gas, and that wealth freed up women to marry whomever they damn well wanted.
The cultures on Earth that abhor child marriage are the rich West and the democratic wealthy Asians who largely picked up the Western lifestyle.
The ABC obsession with blaming all things on “climate change” is like a stone-age cult. Claire Campbell, who wrote the ABC piece has probably never met a skeptic, let alone interviewed one. If she had, she might have realized that the experts have no idea what drives El Niño events. Yet here she is implying that we’ve making El Nino’s worse. She’s blending paragraphs of Stone Age nonsense where she can say with a straight face that the Australian government thinks Climate Action might stop climate change, which might stop an El Niño, which might help a girl in Bangladesh become a brain surgeon.
El Niño expected to ‘intensify’ child marriage rate
Kamrul Hasan Shawon said he too often met girls who aspired to be doctors, pilots or even entrepreneurs lose sight of those goals when they became child brides.
The climate change and resilience program manager for Plan International in Bangladesh said, with the right pathways, these girls would go on to “work wonders” if they were not married off.
And no one at the ABC thought we should ask the government if building solar panels would really solve child brides…
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it was committed to ending child marriage and “protecting the rights of adolescent girls across the Indo-Pacific region”
“Under Australia’s International Development Policy, gender equality and climate action are placed at the very core of Australia’s aid program.”
The best thing we could do for the little girls of Bangladesh is probably to help them build coal fired power stations or nuclear plants. Except we don’t know how to make nuclear plants, and the Russians have already built one for them which is expected to start operation soon. Maybe one day they’ll help us…
h/t David of Cooyal in Oz