Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Lesotho (pronounced “Leh – soo – too”), is a mountain fortress of a country, totally surrounded by South Africa. The people there, the Basotho (pronounced “Bah – soo – too), are tough as nails, and you’d have to be. It’s high desert country, cold in the winter, not much water. The Basotho are fiercely independent.
Back in the early days, they fought off the Boers who tried to take their land. The Boers then drove them off of the fertile lowlands and into the arid mountains. So their King cut a deal with the British Queen Victoria for the country to be a British Protectorate … very clever, one of the few parts of Africa that was never conquered and was never a colony of anybody. These days, curiously, most of the time the country is populated by old folks, and women and kids—the only real employment for hundreds of miles around are the mines of South Africa … including the coal mines. So the men are all at work in South Africa, and the country runs on the money that the miners send home.
Of a wintry morning in Maseru, the capital, there’s a haze across the city from the thousands and thousands of coal fires. By and large, these fires are warming poor women’s shacks and shanties, and cooking what passes for their kids’ breakfasts. They burn coal because it’s what they have. There are no forests, so they can’t burn wood. There are no great herds of cattle, so they can’t burn dung.
Photo SourceAnd as a result, Maseru mornings have that curious acrid smell that only comes from coal, and the haze that comes from coal burnt in leaky stoves and open three-stone fires.
I bring up this image of dirt-poor people in a dirt-poor country to provide a clear context for the New York Times report of the latest lethal IPCC recommendation, which they describe as follows:
To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the level of preindustrial times, the panel found, no more than one trillion metric tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas released into the atmosphere.
Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at the rate energy consumption is growing, the trillionth ton will be released somewhere around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than three trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels. SOURCE
First, the “internationally agreed target” of 2°C? I don’t recall any international agreement on that, except perhaps among attendees at one of the IPCC’s annual moribund quackathons held in Rio or somewhere.
But lets look instead at the important issue, the numbers that they give for carbon. They say we’ve burnt a half-trillion tonnes, and that we should stop when we’ve burned another half trillion tonnes, and leave the other two-and-a-half trillion tons of fossil fuels in the ground. Leave it in the ground … the mind boggles. Never happen.
So in a scant few decades, the women of Maseru are supposed to just stop burning coal? And do what? Burn their furniture? They could pull up the floorboards and burn them … if they had floors …
Dont’cha love these guys? Don’t they understand that their policies KILL PEOPLE! I apologize for shouting, but they seem to be congenitally blind to the results of their actions, so perhaps their ears still work. Do they have a plan in hand for fueling Maseru, and a thousand other Maseru’s around the world? Wind won’t do it. Sun won’t do it. So in a couple decades … what?
Here’s what they avert their eyes from.
Artificially increasing energy prices for any reason harms, impoverishes, and kills the poor.
Yes, kills. People die from the cold. If the women of Maseru have to pay more for coal, they have less money to pay for food. So they will buy a bit less coal and a bit less food, and somewhere in there, in the hidden part that far too many people don’t want to think about, kids are dying. It’s already happening. The World Bank and the US are currently refusing to fund coal-fired power plants around the world … rich people refusing cheap energy to poor people, on my planet that is disgusting and criminal behavior.
Can’t say much more than that without excessively angrifying my blood, thinking about rich 1%ers like the IPCC conclave and Myles R. Allen trying to make all fossil fuels more expensive, and blithely ignoring the lethal consequences of their actions. So I’ll leave it there, but spread the word.
Expensive energy kills poor people.
Best to all,
w.
Yes Willis, he wrote to Victoria but the answer, although perhaps signed by her, was that of the Foreign Office. She had to do as she was told, just like all of them for the last two hundred years or so.
But your bottom line of “expensive energy kills people” still hold good. (or indeed holds bad.)
Sean Peake says:
September 27, 2013 at 11:47 am
It’s OK, Willis. Steven Mosher links to the debt-saddled, intermittent solution for all poor people from 2 years ago. Crisis averted
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the links were provided to make more information accessible for people who want to read.
Im not endorsing it, just linking. Kinda like linking to realclimate. doesnt mean you endorse it.j
some of the claims, specially about dung, seemed wrong to me, and its well known that other countries are working to bring local renewables to africa, so I took 15 seconds to search.
As a good capitalist I see that other sellers of stuff are looking to help africa not because they are altruistic but because they need consumers.
http://www.undp.org.ls/energy/renewable_energy.php
oldseadog says:
September 27, 2013 at 12:06 pm
OK, to pick an even smaller nit, in 1867, Queen Victoria was monarch not just of Britain but of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland (by Acts of Union of 1800-01). In the next decade, she became Empress of India as well.
While not officially Queen of England, she could be called an English queen, because she was born in England, although her ancestry was almost entirely German (however her father & grandfather, George III, were born in England). She had one Stuart great-great-great-great-great-great-mother, Elizabeth of Scotland, b. 1596 & older sister of Charles I, upon whom her dynasty’s claim to the throne ultimately lay.
Notice how the discussion has drifted from the poor being without power to the total supply of power? If 75% of the people live in small villages at the side of some hill, are they the electrical power consumers, or their “betters” in Maseru?
The power grid in Lesotho is all but non-existent outside the city cores where about 25% of the population lives. Using Google Earth to fly over the country one of the missing landmarks is power lines. They have a serious last-mile problem for electricity – there is little rural demand for electricity because they have no devices, and they have no money to buy devices to create that demand. 25% of the population is HIV positive, the life expectancy is about 52 years, and most of the jobs are in local mines or SA. The resident population is predominantly female as their mates are away at jobs in SA. I am unable to find any installed wind turbine farms. The water projects are principally intended to provide water to SA and electricity secondarily. They are a net importer of energy despite the billions spent on water projects.
They have little in the way of sewer systems, hence the popularity of “biomass” energy, a cute name for sewage waste.
“..rich people refusing cheap energy to poor people, on my planet that is disgusting and criminal behavior.”
On top of that, the rich, while denying the 3rd world access to their own energy resources like coal, the very SAME kind of energy resources that blessed those rich countries and fueled the creation of their current wealth, are now using their wealth to buy up the food and or food growing resources of the 3rd world, (and from other places thus increasing food prices worldwide as well), to feed their automobiles back in the EU and USA.
So biofuel is another vile criminal behavior, one by rich Marxist eco-elitists that’s starving people in the third world. And worse, I think death is the very purpose they had in mind from the beginning because they HATE the idea of the third world ever coming out of poverty and stabilizing it population the way we did via free market capitalism. It’s all a study of how they are trying to do to the third world what Stalin did to the Ukraine but without anyone really noticing or caring what’s going on.
Why seize farms from poor people by force like Stalin did when you can just buy the food right out of the mouths of their starving children to get the same ultimate result – genocide?
Willis: the energy policies currently favored by the political classes will prove a catastrophe worldwide. It will certainly be an issue in Africa which is sadly subject to a myriad of different human tragedies.
In the western world, our obsession with “green” energy is leading to all manner of stupidity and it will undoubtedly cause real economic and social damage. Millions will be inconvenienced and see their standard of living fall. However, this mischief is unlikely to result in death on a massive scale.
However, I worry most about the developing world (areas like India and China). Billions of people will be seriously impacted and their ability to adjust and cope is far less well developed than in the USA and Western Europe. If enacted there, these policies will harm billions. The direct deaths will be substantial but most likely minor compared to that which results from the subsequent violence and war. Of this I am 96% (more than the IPCC) certain!
Given the lack of an electrical power grid, coal makes even more sense for Lesotho. Coal-burning furnaces in houses, schools & other buildings are an appropriate technology, even with rough roads for the delivery trucks.
Dear Willis,
I did read you article, but I only had to see your title, I just thought YOU ARE IS SO BL**DY RIGHT!! Cheap energy should be a primary goal of a benificent government. Pollution has to be controlled. Education to get the most from ths coal, cast iron stoves with combined heating for hot water ( which provides sanitation) or other improved methods of combustion would improve the lives of our common sisters and brothers in humanity .
Please excuse the capitals but I wished to emphasise my support for your view
I should say fireplaces or stoves rather than furnaces, which sound too grandiose.
just a minor point regarding electricity su7pply (however generated) – and that is, the poor rural folk will need power lines, domestice circuitry AND electric appliances to be able to use it! (Is that part of the 9bn investment – or shall I take out shares in an electric cooking appliance manufacturer who will doubtless make a killing extracting vast sums of cash for poorm people who will have to buy botht eh electricy AND the appliances!??)
Steven Mosher says:
September 27, 2013 at 12:56 pm
UNDP? Sorry, not impressed. Here’s one from the page:
I’m sure they’re cranking out lots and lots of words about renewable energy in Lesotho …
w.
Milodonharlani,
I say again, from 1707 “English” is not a nationality because England ceased to exist as a “Nation State” in that year. Victoria was “British” by nationality and birth.
Would you say that President Bush was American or Texan (or whatever US State he was born in)?
But enough – my head is hurting from watching the BBC News reporting the antics in Sweden. I need another dram.
oldseadog says:
September 27, 2013 at 12:41 pm
Yes Willis, he wrote to Victoria but the answer, although perhaps signed by her, was that of the Foreign Office. She had to do as she was told, just like all of them for the last two hundred years or so.
But your bottom line of “expensive energy kills people” still hold good. (or indeed holds bad.)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
On a tangent,but the Queen of Australia (we are a constitutional monarchy) holds certain reserve powers.
The most important being the power to force the government to have an election if the senate and the house of representatives become deadlocked on passing legislation.
(She also happens to be the queen of Britain, and the 14 other countries.)
http://www.royal.gov.uk/monarchandcommonwealth/overview.aspx
Agreed, totally agreed but not just in the developing world.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/just-how-far-are-you-prepared-to-go-to-feel-good-about-yourself/
Pointman
Willis, Many thanks.
The greenies get wild- eyed when confronted with the tragic result of their onerous thinking.
They’ll usually rationalize how much better we’ll be with a lot fewer people on the planet.
They then get positively huffy when you suggest to them, a tall bridge.
All the blather over CO2 and the only directly measured effect I’ve ever found for CO2 in the atmosphere is a cooling effect that NASA reported back in 2009.
CO2 in the thermosphere cools the planet –
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/coolingthermosphere.html
The UN, and their army of NGOs, busy “Exchanging everything you got for nothing you want”
Friends:
In hope of ending this side-track, I write to support Felflames.
The monarch of Great Britain and Northern Ireland plus several Commonwealth countries has important powers in Britain.
Each Tuesday the Prime Minister (PM) has an audience with the monarch. PMs are politicians and would have abandoned this practice long ago if the monarch had no power.
No Bill passed by Parliament becomes Law until it obtains the Royal assent (i.e. is signed by the monarch who wears the Crown).
Each year HM Government provides a document called the Queen’s Speech which lays out what the government intends to do in that Session of Parliament. At the Opening of Parliament the monarch reads those parts of the Speech which the monarch agrees to give Assent if passed by Parliament. The government usually does not want a Constitutional problem (potentially a crisis) so does not pursue items omitted when the monarch reads the Queen’s Speech. Hence, in effect the monarch has right of veto of a matter before it is presented to Parliament because the government would not waste time on the matter. However, in the last century two Bills were passed by Parliament but were not granted the Royal Assent: both proposed abolishing the House of Lords.
HM Queen Elizabeth II is the most experienced politician in the world having sat on the throne since 1952. Long may she reign (she has done well and we get Charles next).
So, it is extremely likely that Queen Victoria would have personally replied to the King of Lesohto after having consulted her advisors who would have included her Consort, Albert (who was a German), and the then PM supported by Her government and its Civil Service. Importantly, for Lesotho to have been granted British Protectorate status would have required her agreement.
Richard
Argumentum ad misericordiam.
In a “scant few decades” Lesotho will not be the same as it does now. The Lesotho in the picture certainly doesn’t look like it did a “scant few decades” ago. I think you are presuming a lot if you expect that the poor women of Lesotho will still be dependent on burning coal in open fires. I’d expect to see them living in much better insulated houses, cooking on electric ranges, and heating their homes with reticulated gas. I also expect the electricity and gas will probably come from the nearby coalfield. But who knows – maybe they’ll have nuclear energy in Lesotho by then. Africa could be about to take off economically and Lesotho could be the African Singapore.
Willis said:
Oddly, and in a rather intelligent surprise, hydro is considered a renewable resource in Lesotho unlike here in Washington State where hydro is not so considered. That is a political view – the science says we have lots of rain in the Pacific Northwet, and our watersheds fail us only during periods of glaciation. Doesn’t matter – our leadership wants unreliable, expensive wind energy. Our leadership could learn from their leadership.
Matthew R Marler says:
September 27, 2013 at 12:32 pm
Good question … I’ll make it the subject of my next post. Short answer? 12V …
Regards,
w.
The grand strategy of deep greens is depopulation. Well they will get their wish no matter what, given the current demographic curve. The decline could be further accelerated by world war, a cooling emergency, a cosmic threat or a combination of these. Also there is the looming antibiotic crisis.
cynical_scientist says:
September 27, 2013 at 3:37 pm
No, argumentum pro the poor among us experiencing the manifold miseries of expensive energy.
Are you seriously arguing that saving poor people in 50 years is worth impoverishing and even killing poor people now? You’re in favor of denying electricity and heat to the poor peasant farmers of the world?
w.