With the Christmas season ending and radio stations returning to their regular selection of music, one song I most certainly will not miss is that painful British tune “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” Written nearly 40 years ago by a group of British musicians to raise money for victims of Ethiopia’s famine, the song is best remembered as the leading prompt for millions worldwide to change the station — a truly terrible, annoying, sanctimonious song despite its noble intentions and purported support for a worthy cause.
Resulting mostly from the tribal chaos of the country’s decade-long civil war, the Ethiopian famine affected roughly 8 million people. What saved the nation was fossil fuels. Yes, the generosity of Western nations helped. America alone donated nearly 800,000 metric tons of food worth over $400 million in 1984. Our surplus yields resulted from better farm equipment, irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides.
Our farming abundance is only possible because of fossil fuels. If you told a Gen Zer with a plastic water bottle from Fiji eating avocado toast that most of humanity has been hungry, he would not comprehend. If you told him fossil fuels are bad, he would be the first to block traffic for the cause.
The line, “In our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy,” needs a fact-check. It is not mere luck. It is the development of life-saving agricultural practices made possible by fossil fuels. The song tells us, in Africa, “Nothing ever grows. No rain nor rivers
