Obsessive worry!

The West wanted to keep third world countries poor to exploit them.
And force them into IMF debt traps that would force them to sell off any advancements they made.

China's different.
They want to build up these nations to become prosperous societies so they in turn buy more cheap Chinese goods.

The West saw a zero sum game of exploitation, where China sees a win-win for themselves and the other country.

I support a multipolar world where all nations are treated more equally.
Where everyone gets a seat at the table, where sovereignty and national security interests are respected.
Where countries don't try to rule by threats, blackmail, regime change and military intervention.
Or by sanctions, or controlling the means of transferring funds or using trade as a weapon.

Sanctions are collective punishment of a population
Regime changes aren't for the benefit of the people but they can be portrayed to be with the lifting of sanctions.
They are to benefit foreign powers, otherwise why would they bother?

I'm tired of a western lead Unipolar world where one nation and empire cares only for itself.

I don't believe Maduro was involved in drug trafficking
But I can make a valid argument why he SHOULD HAVE BEEN.

Venezuela food shortages cause some to hunt dogs, cats, pigeons
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/05/18/venezuela-food-shortages-cause-some-hunt-dogs-cats-pigeons/84547888/

You do that to other nations citizens, for WHATEVER reason, you almost deserve drugs sent to your country in response.

Absolutely no argument that the third world should emulate the first world by getting and using the most reliable and cheapest form of power, fossil fuels. Especially when they have ready access to it.

And no argument that the globalist left in the west, primarily represented by the UN have been actively trying to deprive these people of that power source.

But the third world has its own agency. You treat them like children who can't make and implement decisions for themselves. They have the right, duty and ability to start rapid development. They don't because:

* the leaders are enthralled and reliant on institutions like the UN

and/or

* they are more interested in fighting generation old tribal conflicts.

____________________________________________________________________

AC, can't help but notice that you completely avoided the evidence I provided that the collapse in the Venezuelan economy had nothing to do with the sanctions. Too complex for you?

I didn't ignore it, I just don't have a good response to it, truthfully I don't know enough.

I read that the economy crashed not from sanctions but a crash in the price of oil, I'd have to look at the timeline more carefully and find out if this fits and if there were any other factors.

It doesn't change what Trump said, that its America's oil and the Venezuelans stole it.
I'm not sure how accurate these news stories are.
(Whether important facts are omitted as often is the case)

http://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/05/business/oil-venezuela-trump
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-05/why-venezuelan-oil-is-not-stolen-from-the-united-states/106200804

mhaze says in reference to the Third World: "They have the right, duty and ability to start rapid development".

I doubt few would disagree.

Many African countries are taking Pakistan as example of how quickly energy usage can shift.

The African Business website states: "The solar boom in Pakistan has been astonishing for its speed and scale. But the other remarkable feature of the boom is that it has been largely unplanned. “This is a consumer revolution,” says Dave Jones, chief analyst at Ember. Solar panels are available for $60 to $80 in the country, he points out. Ordinary people can simply buy a panel from a hardware shop and install it themselves with the help of a YouTube video.

“The first question that everyone asked around Pakistan was, where’s the money coming from for this? Who’s lending them the money? And the answer is no one,” Jones says. Panels have simply reached a price where they are affordable for a sizeable slice of the population, he explains".

Many in the Third World had limited access to fixed-line phone services. Mobile phones allowed billions of people to completely skip ownership of this level of technology.

The way things are going billions more may skip fossil fuel energy for newer electrical generation technology.

mhaze,

No serious argument denies agency. The question is how constrained that agency is by capital access, timelines, and infrastructure choices.

Large fossil projects are not consumer goods. They require long-term financing, sovereign guarantees, and political stability. That's precisely where multilateral lending norms and risk premiums matter, whether we like it or not.

What's interesting is that we're now seeing a parallel path emerge. Pakistan's solar uptake wasn't driven by ideology or development banks, but by price collapse and consumer choice. That's not infantilisation, it's a structural shift.

This doesn't mean solar replaces industry overnight. It does mean that parts of the world may electrify households, services, and communications without repeating the exact fossil-heavy trajectory of the West.

The mistake is assuming development has only one valid sequence. History shows it rarely does.

Pakistani pre capita GDP - $US 1700.

Yes I'm sure all third world nations aspire to be Pakistan. </sarc>

mhaze,

No one is suggesting Pakistan is an "aspirational end state". It's an existence proof.

A country with per-capita GDP around $1700 seeing rapid, unsubsidised household solar uptake is evidence of how low the entry barrier has become, not where development should stop.

That's precisely why the example matters. It shows electrification pathways don't have to begin with capital-intensive, centrally financed fossil projects to deliver immediate welfare gains.

If your claim is that this model can't generalise beyond Pakistan, then the relevant question is why the price-driven mechanism wouldn't apply elsewhere. GDP alone doesn't answer that.

The Ember group analysis goes further (of course).

"a 420-watt solar panel that sells for around US$60 in Nigeria would produce 550 kilowatt/hours (kWh) in a year at a cost of 14 cents/kWh. Compare that to spending $60 for diesel, at a price of 66 cents per litre (at the time of analysis), an expense that would yield only 275 kWh of electricity, “implying a payback time of just six months” for the solar panel.

Further: The data showed that exports could support record growth rates for 20 countries across the continent from June 2024 to June 2025. The rate for Algeria was stunning, with incoming solar gear increasing 33-fold during that time. Zambia, Botswana, and Sudan rose eightfold, sevenfold, and sixfold, respectively, while Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Benin, Angola, and Ethiopia all more than tripled.

The solar panels imported into Sierra Leone in the last 12 months, if installed, would generate electricity equivalent to 61% of the total reported 2023 electricity generation,

The year’s imports to Chad could similarly generate 49% of that country’s total energy generation in 2023. Solar’s share of energy generation could increase by 10% in Liberia, Somalia, Eritrea, Togo, and Benin, and 5% in 16 other countries.

mhaze, it might be time to hang up your Pith helmet for good.

Oh dear. Let me explain to those who seem to (deliberately? )not get it.

If you want a nation where the people live in something slightly better than abject poverty, then by all means encourage them to rely on home solar panels that allows them to turn on a few lights and maybe run an electric appliance or two.

If you want a functioning economy that allows people to live something approaching a 21st century lifestyle enjoyed in the west, then they need to have massive amounts of reliable power to run cities and particularly factories and manufacturing facilities as well as a functioning service industry. Home solar can't and never will do that.

Its all very well for keyboard warriors to sit in their A/C cooled homes and encourage the 10% of the world's poorest to live the life provided by home solar when they'd prefer the life provided by fossil fuel.

But we have a planet to save from the dreaded CO2 so the abject poor will just have to suck it up, n'est pas?

Oh dear, mhaze.

Do you really believe that starting your posts with "Oh dear" will hide the that you're about to smuggle in a false requirement?

No one is arguing that household solar replaces heavy industry, nor that it delivers a Western lifestyle overnight.

That's a strawman.

The point being made is simpler and harder to dismiss: falling costs are allowing rapid, bottom-up electrification that historically took decades, without waiting for capital-intensive megaprojects.

Lighting, refrigeration, communications, water pumping, clinics, schools, and small enterprise are not "abject poverty". They are the preconditions for growth.

Every industrial economy passed through that stage before factories and steel mills followed. Skipping that step was never how development worked.

What the data shows is not climate paternalism, but revealed preference: people adopting what is cheaper and available now. That doesn't preclude grids, gas, hydro, or future nuclear. It accelerates the path toward them.

If the claim is that this mechanism delays development rather than speeds it up, that needs to be argued, not asserted.

I suppose Woke Marxist's want to choke businesses by denying them electrical power. A similar way that they try to destroy AngloCelts/ Europe by multiculturalism. They must think it's poetic to destroy open society by open society (rhymes with of a people, by a people, for a people... ).