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Not that again

15 Jan 2025 | OP ED Watch

You know what we hate? That thing where you tell Gmail you’ve read an item and it snootily marks it as unread again. Almost as bad as “The operation cannot be performed because the message has been changed”, surely the most useless bug in history. Or when you buy some fancy gadget and can’t get a digital version of the paper manual even once you battle past the bot to something misleadingly labeled “customer service” which insists they don’t have that document even after you point out that they printed it and put it in the box. And if you think we’re being petty and whiny about First World problems, you’re right. Because what people should hate is that, for instance, 17 million human beings in Latin America and the Caribbean alone never face any of those issues because they don’t have access to electricity, never mind a frozen web page. In Asia and the Pacific, according to International Gas Union figures and yes they have a dog in the fight, it’s 150 million, with another 350 million having only limited access. That’s right. Half a billion people don’t have to worry about the light switch not working because there isn’t one. And yet countless well-fed activists with more selfies on their phone than they can sort look at those numbers and think we must prevent them from burning natural gas or coal, stop them building nuclear reactors and keep inhaling particulates from wood and dung if they stupidly persist in cooking what little food they’ve managed to obtain. While hating us for lacking compassion and concern for the future.

We do take issue with the IGU video for rallying round the white flag. It insists that natural gas must be part of the process of getting rid of natural gas, and blathers about “the global expansion of decarbonization technologies”, complete with images of wind turbines and solar panels, the carbon footprint of African coal consumption, “the planet’s sustainable future” and “a just and orderly energy transition”. As French aristocrats might have supported faster and sharper guillotines to promote an orderly social transition. Do we really want to cover the Serengeti with solar panels, and tell the rhinos and cheetahs so sorry, we needed your habitat, kindly step into this zoo?

There’s also some question about the definition of “clean cooking” as in “There are more than 900 million people across Africa without access to clean cooking”. Even given the widespread grinding poverty on that continent, for which oddly they don’t give a figure for people without electricity, it’s still nearly three-quarters of the 1.4 billion total which sounds high. As with “limited access”, they may have adopted a tendentious standard for measuring “clean cooking”, for which our own stove and kitchen floor might not qualify, though the accompanying image of a woman leaning into a fire to blow on sticks does underline the very real issue here.

It is real. And it matters. Camping is fun when it’s optional. Less so when there’s no modern house to go back to and take a shower, whose water then flows into a modern sanitary disposal system not an open sewer that doubles as the street kids walk down to school. And the people who gallivant about from one international conference to another, enjoying gluten-free cookies and high-speed WiFi in the airport lounge, and putting out sanctimonious press releases from their air-conditioned offices and limousines about how, though they don’t put it this way, Africans are better off choking on dung with no access to a hospital than they would be if the Arctic warmed by 0.3C, should spare a thought for the people who won’t be afflicted by “climate change” because energy poverty will kill them first.

Black lives matter, don’t they?

3 comments on “Not that again”

  1. It's like Hank Williams Jr. says to the climate alarmist pols and their ilk,don't tell me to lower my thermostat or take the bus while you're flying everywhere in jets,and driving Cadillacs.I'm paraphrasing a bit.But it makes sense after reading the last paragraph above.Those jet-setters flying off to COP meetings and the like are the biggest hypocrites going.

  2. Thousands of children die from wood smoke in their homes from cooking fires, and no, those fires are not always wood.

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