Most, if not all, individuals encountered daily in my native country of India appear to have adopted the media’s narrative of a climate crisis. Of course, individuals with demanding schedules often lack the time or energy to research climate science and sort through conflicting assertions in the news.

Ideologues, in collaboration with much of the media, have exploited the public’s naivete to promote fear of a supposedly overheating planet and halt the use of fossil fuels. The result has been numerous countries gradually sliding into economic self-destruction, of which many remain oblivious.

Popular news media hold an advantage. They have been considered trusted beacons of truth. But those beacons now shine a light that blinds rather than illuminates. “Green” energy dogma, repeated ad nauseam by know-nothing politicians and compliant media, drowns out cries of the impoverished in developing nations. These are people just beginning to stand on their own and in need of the affordable and reliable energy of fossil fuels to rise from generational poverty.

From the bustling newsrooms of Lagos to the editorial desks of Bogotá, journalists have embraced the fantasy of wind and solar energy replacing coal, oil and natural gas.

The media’s climate obsession – lifted wholesale from the politically motivated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and parroted by Western elites – is at the heart of a campaign of distortion and fearmongering.

The populations of South America and Africa – home to some of the world’s richest reserves of coal, oil and natural gas – are told by their media to shun these resources in favor of wind and solar technologies that are woefully inadequate for the needs of a modern society.

How did this abomination take root? Gullible reporters – often young and impressionable – are easy marks for fraudulent purveyors of novel, seemingly promising visions that have no chance of getting beyond wishful thinking. Repetition of falsehoods – no matter their absurdity – breeds belief. When a narrative is hammered home day after day through BBC documentaries, CNN panels or Guardian editorials, it seeps into the public psyche and masquerades as fact.

This effect is magnified in the developing world, where media literacy is often nascent and faith in Western outlets runs deep. The public, trusting and time-strapped, rarely digs deep. Articulate personalities exalted as experts assure consumers that access to a green nirvana only requires abandoning fossil fuels.

Lost in this barrage is any substantive counterpoint, and absent is a whisper of doubt. Media gatekeepers, enthralled by their own righteousness, seldom present the engineers who warn of instability in the power grid or economists who tally the costs of “decarbonization” – an objective whose pursuit threatens societal collapse. Instead, dissenters are dismissed as “deniers”, their voices drowned by the chorus of a purported consensus.

The result is a press that cheers policies antithetical to its audience’s interests. International lenders, swayed by the climate mob, tie financing to “renewable” mandates. The World Bank, once a financier of coal plants in Africa, now balks at funding anything that emits demonized carbon dioxide, leaving countries like Mozambique struggling to exploit their gas fields.

In Ghana, where power outages still plague daily life, the government hesitates to tap coal reserves, wary of an international backlash stoked by media outrage. In Kenya, where coal in the Mui Basin could power millions, local outlets echo The Guardian’s disdain for “dirty energy,” ignoring how such resources could slash electricity costs for the rural poor.

In South America, pressure from green-leaning non-governmental organizations – amplified by outlets like O Globo – has stalled oil projects in Ecuador, even as indigenous communities plead for the jobs and infrastructure they bring. In Peru, where natural gas discoveries promise economic liftoff, El Comercio fixates on melting glaciers, marginalizing rural natives still cooking over open fires.

In many developing countries, natural gas could ease energy prices, but policymakers bowed to “green pressure” and left citizens to shoulder rising costs. The poorest suffer most from higher bills, fewer jobs and dimmer futures.

Popular news reporting no longer empowers with facts but an incestuously recounts nonsense that leaves the developing world with the burden of a climate crisis fabricated by self-dealing globalists.

Journalists, meanwhile, lay claim to climate virtue. Wasting a chance to lead by challenging melodramatic predictions of global warming and rosy fairy tales about free energy from the sun and wind, reporters and editors pander to deceivers and deliver deception. People of the developing world must demand better or have their hopes buried by false prophets. And journalists in Africa, South America and Asia must break free from the echo chamber of the climate industrial complex. It is time to ask tough questions – the basis of critical thinking and honest reporting.