Going from a low to high standard of living raises one’s carbon footprint, no? So bringing in droves of relatively poor people into America is a big contributor to climate change, no?
Lots of factors going on here. “White” people are not uniformly clever, rich or even particularly intelligent, these traits are more or less evenly distributed to persons of every ethnic origin in the world.
What happened to make one small pocket of humanity suddenly blossom and make great strides in extending the parameters of technology, rational thought and moral insight, was largely an accident of time and place. For a while, the right to employ innovation without it being forbidden by tyrants, or to know relatively unfettered freedom and liberty, and being permitted to keep and use the products of imaginative thought, led to a degree of prosperity that up to then, had been unknown in the world.
A frontier far from the center of the empire that had colonized that untamed land, and had only loosely held authority expressed there, was fertile ground for this growth of a new period of enlightenment. The American spirit was born amidst the challenges and uncertainties of the time, and by holding to basic rights which were attributed to a Creator, and of which all men are endowed, the whole period of ambitious expansion and optimism bloomed and growth built upon growth.
There are those who think this is a bad thing, that too few people are taking too many of the resources from the rest of the people who never knew, or would not recognize, the spirit of freedom of thought, and the rights to life, liberty and the ownership and quiet enjoyment of property, not merely for the oligarchs, but for the common man, the yeomen who did the heavy lifting and the hard labor that created the wealth in the first place.
People toil all over the world, but remain destitute because the spirit of these rights endowed by divine power is denied to them. Given permission to take advantage of all the bounty so freely bestowed from powers far beyond that of mere men, these same people will prosper greatly, for much more than what earlier would have been their wildest imaginations.
God, guns, guts, and glory.
Also, Carbon Dioxide is plant food.