There were two big marches on opposite sides of the planet this weekend.

At the Turkish border an estimated 130,000 destitute refugees flooded in from Syria. They were fleeing from the Islamic State terrorist group.

It was the equivalent of a whole city on a death march. No electricity, no heat, no clean water and, of course, no safety or security. If they had stayed in the rogue country being set up as an Islamic state, they faced execution-style mass murders at the hands of terrorists.

On the other side of the planet, in the world’s richest city, was another march of similar size. Not a death march, or a march of deprivation or desperation. But a highly organized, well-financed march of rich white kids. It was called the People’s Climate March, but it could have been called the White People’s Problems march.

You know what White People’s Problem sounds like: Should I upgrade to a new iPhone, or should I spent that money on Katy Perry concert tickets? Organic kale or gluten-free quinoa?

Oh, and they were white. In one of America’s most diverse cities, the march was as white as a Woody Allen movie, with just as much self-absorption.

The official reason for the march was climate change. Which is quite something, given that United Nations scientists, at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, continue to report that there hasn’t been any measurable global warming in 18 years.

The Syrian march was 130,000 people fleeing real and imminent death. The New York march was Occupy Wall Street’s spoiled brats, out this year with an eco-theme.

It is true that the climate changes. It has since the dawn of time. But only in the age of industrialization has the death toll of climate change – hot summers, freezing winters, storms and floods – been mitigated. Precisely through the fruits of a fossil fuel economy.

That’s the thing about global warming, since renamed “climate change” to evade the inconvenient truth that the world just isn’t warming. It’s a rich man’s complaint.

They don’t march against fossil fuels in Africa or most of Asia, because they’re too poor. They welcome coal-fired power plants, because it’s that or the alternative – to live without electricity, to live in darkness at night, and cold in the winter, and heat in the summer, and to move and work by hand and foot, or at best with animal power.

It’s how we used to live in the west, too, before our industrial revolution liberated us from subsistence lifestyles, and nearly tripled our life expectancy.

There is a whiff of imperialism in the “climate change” campaign. We westerners are allowed our fossil fuels – including the 500 diesel-powered buses that brought rich white college students to the New York protest. But developing countries should be denied their industrial revolution, or be forced to accept unreliable, costly sources of energy like solar panels or wind turbines, that are experimental novelties in the west.

Africa and Asia need their own John D. Rockefeller, history’s greatest capitalist, who made his fortune through oil, steel and rail. He became history’s richest man – but only by enriching Americans.

Six generations later, the Rockefeller heirs are spending his billions financing anti-fossil fuel hysteria, like the New York march. They think they’re atoning for their ancestor’s crimes against the environment. But they’re doing so on the backs of billions of the world’s poor.