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Africa’s Real Climate Crisis

Telling Africans they can't have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral.

Life in Africa is often nasty, impoverished and short. AIDS kills 2.2 million Africans every year, say WHO reports. Lung infections cause 1.4 million deaths, malaria 1 million more, intestinal diseases 700,000. Diseases that could be prevented with simple vaccines kill an additional 600,000 annually, while war, malnutrition and life in filthy slums send countless more parents and children to early graves.

And yet, day after day, Africans are told the biggest threat we face is – global warming.

Conferences, news stories, television programs, class lectures and one-sided "dialogues" repeat the claim endlessly. Using oil and petrol, even burning wood and charcoal, will dangerously overheat our planet, melt ice caps, flood coastal cities, and cause storms, droughts, disease and extinctions, we're told.

Over 700 climate scientists and 31,000 other scientists say humans and plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide have minimal effects on Earth's temperature and climate, and there is no global warming crisis. But their views and studies are never invited or even tolerated in these "climate crisis" forums, especially at "ministerial dialogues" staged with United Nations money. Al Gore refuses to debate any of these experts, or even permit questions that he hasn't approved ahead of time.

Instead, Africans are told climate change "threatens humanity more than HIV/AIDS." More than 2.2 million dead Africans every year?

We are warned that it would be "nearly impossible to adapt to the loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet," which would raise sea levels by "5 to 15 meters." That certainly would impact our coastal communities. But how likely is it?

The average annual temperature in Antarctica is minus 50 degrees F! Summer in its Western Peninsula barely lasts two months and gets maybe 10 degrees above freezing for just a few hours a day. Not even Mr. Gore or UN computer models talk about raising Antarctic temperatures by 85 degrees F year-round. So how is that ice supposed to melt?

Let's not forget that sea levels have risen 120 meters since the last Ice Age ended. Do the global warming alarmists think cave men fires caused that? Obviously, powerful natural forces caused those ancient glaciers to come and go – and caused the droughts, floods and climate changes that have affected Africa, the Earth and its animals and people for millions of years.

Just consider northern Africa, where green river valleys, hippopotami and happy villages suddenly got turned into the Sahara Desert 4,000 years ago. Scientists don't know why, but it probably wasn't Egyptian pharaohs building pyramids and driving chariots.

However, the real problem isn't questionable or fake science, hysterical claims and worthless computer models that predict global warming disasters. It's that they're being used to justify telling Africans that we shouldn't build coal or natural gas electrical power plants. It's that the almost total absence of electricity is keeping us from creating jobs and becoming modern societies. It's that these policies KILL.

The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. But Africans are being told we shouldn't develop, or have electricity or cars because, now that those countries are rich beyond anything we Africans can imagine, they're worried about global warming.

The world needs to go on an energy diet, Al Gore and UN climate boss Yvo de Boer tell us. Well, I have news for them. Africans are already on an energy diet. We're starving!

Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping us impoverished.

Not having electricity means millions of Africans don't have refrigerators to preserve food and medicine. Outside of wealthy parts of our big cities, people don't have lights, computers, modern hospitals and schools, air conditioning – or offices, factories and shops to make things and create good jobs.

Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities.

Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this?

Telling Africans they can't have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral. It is a crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, China and India are building new coal-fired power plants every week, so that they can lift their people out of poverty. So even if Africa remains impoverished – and the US and Europe switched to windmills and nuclear power – global carbon dioxide levels would continue increasing for decades.

Even worse, the global warming crusaders don't stop at telling us we can't have electricity. They also campaign against biotechnology. As American, Brazilian and South African farmers will tell you, biotech seeds increase crop yields, reduce pesticide use, feed more people and help farmers earn more money. New varieties are being developed that can resist droughts – the kind Africa has always experienced, and the ones some claim will increase due to global warming.

Environmental radicals even oppose insecticides and the powerful spatial insect repellant DDT, which Uganda's Health Ministry is safely using (along with bed nets and modern ACT drugs) to eliminate killer malaria. They claim global warming will make malaria worse. That's ridiculous, because the disease was once found all over Europe, the United States and even Siberia.

Uganda and Africa need to stop worrying about what the West, the UN and Al Gore say. We need to focus on our own needs, resources and opportunities.

We don't need more aid – especially the kind that goes mostly to corrupt officials who put the money in private bank accounts, hold global warming propaganda conferences and keep their own people poor. We don't need rich countries promising climate change assistance (maybe, sometime, ten years from now), if we promise not to develop.

We need to stop acting like ignorant savages, who thought solar eclipses meant the gods were angry with them, and asked witch doctors to bring the sun back. We need to stop listening to global warming witch doctors, who get rich telling us to keep living "indigenous," impoverished lives.

We need trade, manufacturing, electricity and transportation fuels to power modern industrial economies. We need to do what China and India are doing – develop – and trade more with them.

That is how we will get the jobs, prosperity, health and environmental quality we deserve.

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6 comments to Africa’s Real Climate Crisis

  • GriffithLea

    “Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year.”

    Now there’s a soundbite that really packs a wallop.

    Couldn’t agree more with your article. What would 250 nuclear power plants do to transform Africa?

  • ereusch

    The global warming “logic” is laughable at best. Our Earth has been around for over 4 billion years, and we’ve somehow, in the last 2 centuries or so created enough gas to permanently devastate the entire Earth’s climate? Mind you this is the same gas that created the atmosphere we breathe today! That such claims get the media attention they are, and they’re practically crippling any legislation whether or not intended to address the “problems” is ludicrous. That these things happen in light of the famine and disease pandemic in Africa is downright criminal. You hit it, Fiona, it’s just… immoral. One cursory glance at the entire situation and it’s impossible not to wonder how these alarmists believe they’re truly helping mankind. Remember, every policy has an opportunity cost. How many more humans have to suffer preventable deaths before the alarmists’ concern is assuaged over the future of our climate?! What’s even more amazing is that, even if the disaster scenarios are imminent and accurate, the death and destruction brought will only be indirect at first. People will starve, disease will spread, living conditions will deteriorate… oh, wait that’s what is happening right now! We need to stop this global warming now!

  • ereusch

    Oh, and of course you have to love this:

    http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp

    I’m sure most have seen this email comparing the “Texas White House” (Bush’s residence in Crawford, TX) to Gore’s enormous mansion in Nashville. How can someone who so ardently believes in the impending global warming disasters consume energy like this?! How is this also not next to every. single. picture. of Al Gore and his cronies?!

  • Mickey G

    Seems to me that the most compelling problem in Africa is Africa. Building electric generation, transmission, and distribution systems doesn’t work well in the middle of (choose your term) civil war, holy war, tribal war, etal.

    Until Muslims, Christians, Animalists, and others all decide to tolerate each other the wars will continue. While the wars continue all the aid in the world will not improve standards of living and health. An occassional war probably can intervene (wittness Europe after WWII) and not destroy everything but continuous warfare stops all progress.

    Global warming is not the African problem but stability is the problem.

  • milbrat

    I agree. Africa is a country no different than that of China or India. Both these countries, for the most part, supress their interior religious and/or cultural differences in order to effect economic change for their entire populations.

    The sooner Africans present a united front, the sooner other countries will be interested in investing in infrastructure. The best of intentions won’t get a powerplant built in an area where it is likely to be destroyed by rebels prior to coming on line. The flip side of that is that there are numerous companies looking for opportunities to sell thier products. Powerplants, hospitals, schools, highways, shopping malls, manufacturing plants, etc. Coompanies are willing to build most anything anywhere as long as they can be guaranteed reasonable expectation of being paid. Africa’s major challenge is stability. Once stability is achieved, you may set your own destiny. What is Al Gore, or America going to be able to do to you? Just tell’em to ‘go scratch’; just like China and India have done.

  • Bob Stapler

    Fiona Kobusingye-Boynes,

    Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking article. Most of what you wrote has been said within these pages before, but it has far greater weight coming from an African talking about the plight of her people and continent than it does coming from comfortable Americans, however much we empathize and agree or how well armed with facts and truth. Don’t think we are dismissing your problems as yours alone. Mickey and Millbrat are merely pointing out China can ignore global-warming alarmism because it is strong enough to do so; and it is strong enough to do so because it is not fractured into warring factions susceptible to outsider mandates.

    However, their comments assume Africa can readily put its house in order on the China-India model. It took China 120 years to tame its warring factions and reintegrate its many semi-independent provinces into a single political entity, that it took extreme socialism to finally overcome the natural independence of the Chinese warlords, and another 50 years loosening the socialist grip enough to prosper. India, too, initially accomplished cohesion through socialism, and it has only been in the last decade that that has been tempered and prosperity fragily restored. Socialism does have one significant virtue: that it can forcibly fit fractious people into larger, stronger political units; but, it does so by going through long periods of brutal repression. The path these countries took from supine weakness to strength was brutal in the extreme, worse than what Africa suffers today; though, perhaps, not by enough that Africans will see the difference or the trap.

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