Poverty in America is so bad that some people can barely afford their cell phones.  In much of the rest of the world, poor people starve to death, or die of what in America are ordinary, survivable diseases or injuries.  

In America, injustice is so bad that many lawyers appointed by the court cannot get their clients acquitted of the crimes they committed and must settle for a plea bargain.  Elsewhere, to be accused is to be found guilty and imprisoned in hellhole cellars, innocence being irrelevant to the courts of so-called justice.  

In the U.S., police sometimes bruise a resisting felon and get fired for excessive use of force.  In some parts of the world, the main difference between their police and their criminals is a badge.  Those police routinely brutalize anyone who is not well connected, where the brutality consists of committing robbery, extortion, and rape — at will.  

To be sure, poverty is no picnic for anyone, anywhere.  Injustice at the hands of officials is injustice, plain and simple — anywhere.  In the U.S., there are egregious examples of it.  

Even so, as bad as America sometimes is, people by the millions are risking their lives to get here.  There is a reason for that.  As the tee-shirt with Einstein's image on it says, "It's all relative."  Hope is better than hopelessness.

As recorded in a remarkable video, Konstantin Kisin gave a brief speech during a debate held at the Oxford Union in England, in which he expostulated with the woke culture, which has become a major popular mindset of leftists in the West.  

Speaking with a thread of humor throughout, but dead serious nevertheless, he touched upon a number of subjects and then pulled them together into the topic of "climate change."   

He pointed out that China and India are, by far, the leading factors in damaging the environment, and furthermore, they are not going to slow down.  (Nor are the Africans, I might add.)  The reason, as he points out, is poverty — not poverty as the pampered university students in the West define it, but grinding, abject destitution — hopeless poverty.  Impoverished people across the globe have, as their main concern, daily survival, regardless of pollution.  Will there be a next meal, even if it comes from a dump?  They will not, Kisin points out, condemn their children to starvation simply to appease "Saint Greta [Thunberg]."  Any amount of pollution is preferable to that.  

Even in the West, Kisin says, the woke will not tear out their indoor plumbing to live as do the truly poor, so why should we expect that the homeless of India will forgo economic development if it will feed them? 

Is it hopeless?  Must the environment be doomed?  No, says Kisin (and many others).  The environment can be sustained.  That will not happen by protesting, by defacing artworks in museums, or by (in my view) illegally restricting the rights of free people to exercise their liberties.  The problem will be solved by innovation, by hard work in the development of profit-making industries — in short, by everything that the woke left hates and seeks to destroy.  Capitalism is not bent on its own suicide.  It is a force for good, including the good of the environment.  Nothing else comes close. 

Sadly, as Kisin points out, few on the left are willing (perhaps they are fundamentally incapable of it) to stop crafting their worldview solely on their emotions.  They are unreceptive to facts and reason, even to the point of calling such traits racist and the tool of the oppressor (that is, you).  Thus, they have become puppets, useful idiots, and the actual tools of the actual oppressors, such as the would-be tyrants at Davos. 

Before we can save the environment from the woke who are destroying it, there is one major hurdle that may be impossible to overcome.  How can we fix stupid?

Image: Screen shot from Triggernometry video via YouTube.