https://www.public.news/p/usaid-and-un-poured-billions-into
Activists are blaming climate change when in reality climate activists diverted funding for proven flood death prevention into woke green nonsense
BY MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER
Excerpt: Many are blaming climate change for the flood in Nepal that killed at least 903 and up to 5,000. “A melting glacier contributed to the deadly Nepal floods,” headlined NPR. “We can expect more like this.” It quoted Twila Moon of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who said, “There’s no question that this event was made more likely because of climate change and that we’re seeing more likely other similar glacier hazards occurring.” NBC News reported that the collapse “was linked to climate change, scientists say.” Glaciologist Jakob Steiner told CBS, “What happened yesterday is unfortunately the new normal. It’s going to get worse from here onwards.”
But experts had specifically warned of this disaster for years, the same river had flooded a year earlier, and a cheap technical fix that wasn’t in place would have saved most lives. Sensors and sirens should have alerted people to evacuate and walk uphill and yet last week’s flood came with no alert at all — just like a disaster in 2025.
Proof of the efficacy of flood prevention comes from Bangladesh, which evacuated nearly one million people ahead of a 2022 cyclone with mobile alerts, loudspeakers and concrete shelters and lost fewer than 40 people, where a cyclone of similar size in 1970 had killed 300,000 to 500,000. Nepal could have done the same but didn’t.
The border sensor went silent at 8:40 a.m., which should have caused warning sirens to sound. Nepal’s flood forecasting chief Binod Parajuli said they got a phone call at 8:58, his team confirmed with local officials, and it pushed an SMS alert at 9:13, twelve minutes before the wave reached the town of Betrabati at 9:25. The owner of the firm that installed the flood sensors said the fix would have been a sensor that transmits when instant water crosses a threshold, plus a backup unit 20 to 30 meters higher, which on DHM’s own timestamps would have given the Trishuli towns 45 minutes instead of just 12 minutes.
A 2024 scientific paper specifically flagged the Gyirong-Rasuwa watershed as having the highest glacial-flood risk of any China-Nepal trade corridor, and in July 2025, a supraglacial lake on the Purepu Glacier drained into the same Lhende river, killed at least 11 people, and knocked out the Miteri Bridge, the dry port yard, and 250 megawatts of hydropower. Two weeks later, Austin Lord of the Stimson Center asked, “Will this latest disaster result in lessons learned, or eventually be (conveniently) forgotten?” The answer was yes. China rebuilt the bridge in the same gorge and reopened the crossing in December 2025. Last week’s flood blasted through the same dam.
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Nepal is only the latest disaster that better warning systems could have prevented. Kerr County, Texas balked for nine years at a $976,000 flood warning system, and nearly 100 people died on the Guadalupe on July 4, 2025. In Valencia, Spain, “the flood defence projects, which had been planned for years and with previous studies, were not executed on time,” an expert told Euronews, and the Poyo ravine’s sensors were washed away at 2,283 cubic meters per second.
We should see such disasters as preventable and stop mistaking Malthusian anti-development projects for environmental protection. Global flood deaths fell nearly 90 percent over the last century as nations built levees, dams, drainage and, most of all, early-warning systems. Nepal prioritized many things, including ineffectual “nature-based solutions” and woke programs around gender, rather than the basics of sensors and sirens.
