NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF: Our Gas Guzzlers, Their Lives

BUJUMBURA, Burundi

If we need any more proof that life is unfair, it is that subsistence villagers here in Africa will pay with their lives for our refusal to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

When we think of climate change, we tend to focus on Alaskan villages or New Orleans hurricanes. But the people who will suffer the worst will be those living in countries like this, even though they don’t contribute at all to global warming.

My win-a-trip journey with a student and a teacher has taken us to Burundi, which the World Bank’s latest report shows to be the poorest country in the world. People in Burundi have an annual average income of $100, nearly one child in five dies before the age of five, and life expectancy is 45.

Against that grim backdrop, changing weather patterns in recent years have already caused crop failures — and when the crops fail here, people starve. In short, our greenhouse gases are killing people here.....

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/06/nicholas-d-kristof-our-gas-guzzlers.html

And the fact that we are polluting the earth that gives up that oil is disastrous for the people there. Africa has been pillaged by the white man since the discovery that slaves could be had there. We haven't improved.