Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack along with partners form across the globe focused on catalyzing greater public-private investment and cross-sectors partnership in a climate-smart agriculture and food system innovation, raising global ambition and underpinning mor rapid transformative climate action at the OP26 in Glasgow, Scotland on 4 November 2021. USDA photo.
What is holding Africa back from growth and prosperity? With an average annual income of less than $2,000, the majority of people in Africa rely on fossil fuels for their everyday survival. Demands from wealthy nations on climate control are absurd as well as deadly.
The “Historic” Glasgow Conference
What made Glasgow “historic?” Its (1) cost and (2) carbon footprint, offers the WSJ:
COP26 resulted in an estimated 102,500 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions. That’s more than the annual emissions of some of the nations that participated.
Margatte Wade, an entrepreneur from Senegal and director of the Africa Center for Prosperity at the Atlas Network, writes in the WSJ how “chilling” it is to have a coalition of 250 Western organizations (including Oxfam) lobbying to halt the use and production for fossil fuels in Africa. It’s an overreaching step, she says, that would be a disaster for Africa.
(The Davos crowd) opposes the construction of an oil pipeline in Uganda and Tanzania. More than 700 million African homes rely on biomass (mostly charcoal) for indoor cooking.
Solar panels in the Sahara may conjure up a lovely vision, but they are an untenable nirvana.
(Solar panels) won’t provide energy for 700 million women to cook across the continent.
The priority should be to give Africans cleaner fossil fuels such as propane, or electricity generated by natural gas, for at least the next few decades so they can avoid the effects of burning charcoal, coal and diesel in their small homes.
Cheap Befouling Energy from China
For the foreseeable future coal will remain the No. 1 fuel for electricity generation worldwide, notes the WSJ.
China will fill the void, continues Ms. Wade, if the U.S. and the European Union refuse to support an increase in Africa’s power supply.
Already 30% of new power plants in Africa are built by Chinese contractors controlled by the Communist government. Some of these are heavily polluting coal plants.
The Biden Administration to the Rescue
John Kerry’s assurances that meaningful progress at COP26, with its 1.5-degree-Celsius temperature target (rather than an arbitrary, nonscientific number plucked out of thin air) bear little relation to reality.
As one sage recently voiced, if you want absolutely nothing done, there’s no better leader than climate czar John Kerry
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