What I do know is that Nigeria was recently forced to cut their fuel subsidy, and I highly suspect that was done under indirect pressure from western environmentalists. Which would be a very concrete example of making a couple hundred million very poor people even worse off.
Fair point. But the deeper problem was most of that money never trickled down to its own citizens, built infrastructure or got reinvested in the country. Someone else, not the people, became "owners", making foreign agents the policy-makers.
Just pointing out that the deeper issues often gets lost in the geopolitics. When it progressively makes people's lives worse or exponentially increases debts, it really all leads to the same outcomes in the end.