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.
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Have to agree with you on this on Will, (normally I’m a strong solar supporter)… but isn’t that all the more reason for the developed countries to invest in smarter and cheaper technologies like wind and solar, to cut their emission so that these poorer counties can continue to burn coal while keeping the global within the carbon budget?
Furthermore, there is this whole argument of energy efficiency vs cheap energy… the way I see it is that I prefer energy efficiency any day of the week (and twice on sundays) – as it’s like that good old Christian saying – give man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime… i.e. insulate a house properly and you won’t need to be dependant on burning that much coal, a much better solution in the long term.
Well written article,Willis. The argument that we should kill people now, because our computer models say that will save more people in the future seems rather a stretch of the cautionary principal. I would prefer “Primum non nocere” (first, do no harm).
No I’m not arguing that. Indeed I didn’t argue that. Please don’t put words in my mouth. Apart from anything else I don’t believe that stopping the burning of coal will save enyone except perhaps for a few coal miners killed in industrial accidents.
I was mostly quibbling with your “scant few decades” scenario which in my opinion lacked appreciation for the rate at which places like Lesotho change. Given that the people of Lesotho are as fiercely independent as you say, they are NOT going to give up burning coal on open fires unless they have something better. But in a “scant few decades” I think it is extremely likely that they will have better.
The real question is not whether the poor women in Lesotho will be denied coal to burn in their open fires and will be ripping up their floorboards to burn and keep warm. It is whether the Lesotho of the future is going to end up buying a Chinese built ultra high temperature coal fired power station or a Chinese built thorium fueled nuclear power station.
Mike M says:
September 27, 2013 at 1:34 pm
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
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too true. Until the 1950’s most of the houses in North America had coal bins to heat the house.
The World Bank and the US are currently refusing to fund coal-fired power plants around the world
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exactly what happened with DDT. it was “legal”, but you couldn’t get it without your funds being cut off. Having used DDT to cleanup the their own malaria problems, the wealthy nations became fearful that the poor nations would do the same.
Contrary to popular belief, malaria is NOT a tropical disease. 100 years ago it was global.
As an attendee at the December 2012 meeting in Maseru to discuss the promotion of small scale renewable energy projects I can confirm that the main problem long term is economics.
Save for hydroelectric power the rest is to expensive to subsidise. Funds are of course, as a genuflection, being spent on ‘wind’. Electricity can be genera but the distribution is expensive. Once reaching a site the homes are spread out. Connection cost is an issue and imaginative solutions implemented. But high quality energy (electricity) just isn’t cheap. Subsidising it for one means taking money out of the pockets of many.
Upland cooking fuels are dung and brush. Trees are sold individually and a recognized investment vehicle. Money literally grows.
Coal is an important and inexpensive fuel and there is no reason not to promote vastly improved coal burning products which reduce smoke virtually to zero as is presently being done in Ulaanbaatar.
cynical_scientist says:
September 27, 2013 at 4:48 pm
My point exactly. You don’t see that stopping the burning of coal will cause impoverishment and death among the poor. You think you can argue for making coal expensive or stopping coal use entirely, without the pain and suffering that comes with it.
w.
Crispin in Waterloo but really in Yogyakarta says:
September 27, 2013 at 5:51 pm
I’m constantly amazed by the breadth and depth of the experience of the WUWT readership. No matter what I discuss, someone out there has the latest information and experience. It’s great.
Thanks for the information, Crispin. Cheap energy is the path to development. It’s very tough in places like Lesotho, which is why cheap coal is so important to the poor.
w.
ferd berple says: “too true. Until the 1950′s most of the houses in North America had coal bins to heat the house.”
Yes, heating homes was one aspect. Larger IMO is once the steam power came on line, getting the coal out of the ground became much cheaper. Once it was cheap, visionary entrepreneurs like Carnegie saw the opportunity to get rich making cheap steel via the cheap coal. Having cheap steel to buy allowed the masses to benefit from cheaper rail service and later, factories, automobiles, domestic running water, sewer pipes, steel bridges, etc. It saved the forests from being cut down for heat per your observation but also saved them from being virtually the sole building material for things like ships and bridges.
We owe our very way of life today to coal and crude oil. Without them we’d still be an agrarian society living in the 18th century riding a horse drawn cart to buy dry goods at the general store once every few weeks. Speaking of horses, coal powered train service and gasoline (later) saved the lives of thousands of horses who died of heat exhaustion every summer on the streets of US cities because they had to keep hauling food and ice – no matter how hot it was. (“Beating a dead horse” wasn’t some humorous criticism back then, many poor animals died on the hoof but were held almost erect by others in their team.) Kerosene and piped natural gas (later) saved the whales from being slaughtered for lamp oil.
The know-it-all econazi pinheads don’t acknowledge squat about all THAT stuff in US history. They whine about needing to stop fossil fuel to cure their precious hoax but have nothing of substance to take its place… other than abject economic failure and misery for the masses that are sure to follow in their wake.
I think you will find that a large part of the drive to stop using fossil fuels, and also to replace them with renewable energy, is because governments believe that fossil fuels will eventually run out, and so there needs to be a longer term or alternative energy source available to replace them.
The short term negative consequences on the poor, such as at Lesotho which you point out, they argue, is an unavoidable short term negative, but the phasing out of fossil fuels, sooner rather than later, reduces and addresses a much greater negative effect in the future, when the fossil fuels are no longer available. They also say that there is a danger that the market cannot really account for this or properly anticipate it, and some kind of severe market crash is possible regarding the declining availability of fossil fuels in the future, unless steps are taken to reduce reliance on fossil fuels now.
Furthermore, they argue that fossil fuels are dangerously polluting the atmosphere, which is what all the IPCC is about.
Mind you I’ not sure I agree with any of this, this is just what they believe. So don’t jump on me just yet.
For one, it isn’t clear that fossil fuels will ‘run out’ in the next few hundred years, at least, swe may not have anything to worry about. (There is the possibility of utilising vast amounts of methane hydrates on the ocean floor, for example).
Secondly, I don’t think they are dangerously polluting the atmosphere to cause dangerous climate change.
But thirdly, and this is perhaps even the most important and least understood, the fact that something runs out in the future doesn’t necessarily mean that one shouldn’t use it in the short term. The best example I can think of regarding this is the extraction of most metallic minerals in localised ‘mines’ (where nature has already concentrated the mineral for us mostly through heat and pressure, they are in fact just another form of stored energy, just like fossil fuels); these ALL run out eventually ((the biggest mines today last about 100 years or so), yet people don’t stop mining them just because individually they run out, because the short term gain is highly net positive, and moreover, one can switch to either another area to mine, or an alternative mineral source, if necessary. Minerals themselves, as whole, moreover can NEVER run out on a global scale, there is just too much of them in the earth’s crust, but they can and do ‘run out’ locally, but as mentioned, this doesn’t stop people from utilising them locally and gaining a positive benefit. In fact, in this particular case-mineral extraction as a whole-there is NO alternative, societies require minerals of some kind to function, which leads me to conclude that a certain degree of non sustainability and adaptability is built into our natures and our evolution. And that all the fuss over the IPCC is more about the deeper issue of how we as humans deal with change and certain aspects of non sustainability built into both nature and energy itself.
Excess cold deaths are not discussed. I spent a winter in Northland ,New Zealand and almost froze to death in unheated, uninsulated rooms. I lost 10# from the cold in just a month and being unable to easily drive to find food after a cyclone, as the roads were all closed. People burn kerosene in the homes with space heaters. The houses have no insulation. Some people find shelter by setting up tents inside peoples garages, like camping out. It tends to be from 40-60 degrees F, pouring rain, in the winter.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/461848/NZ-catches-death-of-cold-study.
Unlike energy, metals are recyclable. This may mean that we start mining old dump sites at some point in the future to get metals once the mines finally give out.
Renewables come with a circular prerequisite. You cannot destroy your fossil fuel energy capacity because they are needed to fill in when renewables fail. Like when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing, or when the blades freeze or all of above. The cost of keeping unused equipment churning over 24/7 (you can’t just stop and start these big machines at the whim of the wind) goes up because there are fixed costs you can’t get rid of with this arrangement. In effect we would be paying the plant operators to not generate electricity.
Until someone comes up with a way to cache renewable energy (like we do with nuclear, diesel generators, coal and natural gas generators where it fuel is available on demand) we’re not going to be rid of fossil fuel power.
“Expensive Energy Kills Poor People”
That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Stops them from breathing out CO2 and endangering the planet.
Willis,
I have been spotlighting this particular facet of the lack of humanity of the AGW do-gooders for years now and will continue to do so every opportunity I am able. It is the absolute pinnacle of their hypocrisy, although for many who propagate Sustainable Development it is much more sinister than simple hypocrisy. Those wolves know full well the negative ramifications of their agenda and think of humanity as a plague upon the Earth. As for the multitudes of sheep they steer, many in the flock truly believe they are “saving the world” and doing it “for the children.” It is a pretend Utopia they have been fooled to believe in and as I have said many times the promise of the wolves is only of Sustainable Misery.
While much progress has been made in turning the worm and many fence-sitters have stood up, this war is far from over and those who are desperate to maintain this miserable trajectory as it implodes before their eyes will, I’m afraid, turn to desperate measures to move it forward. But sir I believe we will stop them. My confidence is due to the undeniable thirst to be free and the unquenchable desire to have a better life for ourselves and our children. We have really only been at it for a short time and the progress has been truly remarkable.
But the wolves want to stop that progress. They do not want a robust and expanding middle class, especially on a global scale. They aim to stop us in our tracks and, most dubiously of all, their primary target is the 80% of the world’s population who live in “Annex 2” countries, the relatively poor of the world who these mother bleepers claim to want to help! As I say in that diatribe at The Air Vent, their golden child Sustainable Development will cripple developing countries such as Lesotho such that THEIR WEALTH WILL BE CUT IN HALF!
Sorry. It’s contagious and infuriating. Angrified blood is the cost of empathy and I’m all right with that. WE SHOULD BE ANGRY. Injustices like this are intolerable. Instead of allowing humanity this century to get it’s you-know-what together and finally achieve progress that is “unparalleled in history” these @ur momisugly%$&!s aim to cut the natural growth of economic activity in the year 2100 by $200 trillion! And that’s their figure, like their proud of it, since of course the pastoral lives of our great-grandchildren will be all the richer because they’ll be such good people who really care and wear their collective poverty as a badge of honor.
Save that for some Basotho woman struggling today and likely tomorrow and next year and who will struggle to even see 2050. These wolves dare condemn the poor to Sustainable Poverty with their unnatural restraints against natural growth, their contempt for the “useless eaters” laid bare by their anti-human actions. They are dangerous control freaks with infinite tentacles with which they wish to dictate most everything we do. Their army of self-deluded useful idiots march forth with a smug self-righteousness that belies the ignorance of their advocacy.
In that last link, on the heels of introducing “massive income redistribution and presumably high taxation levels” the IPCC speaks of “significant and deliberate progress toward international and national income equality.” Equality by destroying wealth rather than creating it. Great prescription. The “massive” redistribution is not to the poor as their own figures bear out. It is to themselves and to the appetite of their hoped-for totalitarian mechanisms of global governance. Their subsequent Conferences of Parties have attempted to reframe the real goals by emphasizing “poverty eradication” but that turn was only taken because developing countries told them to go to hell and more and more people woke up to realize that what they were being fed tasted pretty awful. The stewards of supposed sustainability thought they could stop progress by brainwashing us into thinking we’re doing good by living without and accepting punishment for our carbon sins, but that’s where confidence comes back into the picture. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. If ever there was an “unalienable” mandate it is that. Try as they might, we cannot be stopped.
Willis, you are a hell of an advocate for the Golden Economic Age. Please keep fighting for the poor and for what’s right. We need many voices echoing this message, this transparent reality. It is much easier to destroy than create and these neo-Luddites with their promises of hair shirts and personal methane monitors would rather shield themselves from the realities of their own failures by destroying what others have created than join in our natural development toward true economic freedom and environmental stewardship. I think I just coined a phrase that counters Sustainable Development rather nicely (though topping the Golden Economic Age is a tall order). What about Natural Development? Keep the gears turning sir. We’ll solve this conundrum yet. Cheers!
dp says: “Unlike energy, metals are recyclable”.
Yes, but metals also rust and degrade, and the rust process (oxidation) is not reversible (at least economically and practically-from memory it requires vast amounts of energy to reverse/negate the rusting process). This means that metals also eventually ‘run out’ (or can no longer be used), similar to energy.
Moreover, even the mine dump sites you mention run out of metal as well. All mines eventually get to the point where it is no longer profitable to extract the mineral, so the mine shuts. Note the metal/mineral in the ground hasn’t usually run out, it just gets to the point where the grades are not high enough to continue extraction. Different areas compete with each other, so one area shuts down whilst another area starts up. This process goes on continually, and is market forces in action.
But a thing few people understand, especially most academics, is that you can’t actually ‘run out’ of minerals on a world scale, even though you can on a local scale. You never ‘run out’ of minerals even locally, it just gets to the point locally where it isn’t economic to extract, but over time this frequently changes due to economics, technology and demand, which is why mining areas often re-open years later. There are vast amounts of all metals, just sitting in the ground now, but nobody mines them because they aren’t economic to extract. But the available size of the resource is vast eg. >10,000 years at current extraction rates of aluminium, and pretty much all other metals are the same, they will only ‘run out’ when we run out of rocks-in other words never.
But my point generally in bringing up mining, is that essentially it is little different to fossil fuels. All the arguments about fossil fuels, availability, sustainability, pollution, alternative sources, poverty such as at Lesotho etc etc are really much the same. Mineral concentration in the ground occurs by ultimately much the same processes-heat and pressure (and sometimes organic action). People don’t argue about minerals the same way they argue about fossil fuels perhaps partly because there is more money involved in fossil fuels, but the concepts and issues are much the same. One can learn from what goes on all the time in mining, for example, such as over-blown claims of pollution, alternative sources and poverty etc, and apply it to much of the IPCC’s reports. There is nearly always an out of touch group who makes bold and often wrong claims who fail to understand the science behind the issue. The whole thing with climate change and the IPCC is essentially a claim about mineral extraction (in this case fossil fuel-which is just another mineral technically) and the effect on the environment, this occurs with every mine that gets approved/non approved.
Sure. As has been said before, the IPCC and friends are asking (forcing) those in developing countries to let their children die so that the grandchildren they will never have leave a “better planet” for the grandchildren of those in wealthy countries.
My progressive Boulder acquaintances told me repeatedly that conservatives lack creativity. Maybe they know a way to prevent the population from burning coal and grow forests instead:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1350272/Genghis-Khan-killed-people-forests-grew-carbon-levels-dropped.html
richardscourtney says:
September 27, 2013 at 3:33 pm
Correct in all things except Prince Albert, who was already dead in 1867. Queen Victoria’s consort, that is, not the American Prince Fat Albert.
Crispin in Waterloo but really in Yogyakarta:
I write to support your comment at September 27, 2013 at 5:51 pm. You say
Yes, when I was working at the UK’s Coal Research Establishment (CRE) we invented and developed the downdraft stoves which consume their own smoke. Distribution of such stoves is a useful and cheap interim measure for reduced pollution and increased health until rural areas can be connected to a grid supply.
Indeed, CRE developed one design of downdraft stove for use by nomads. It can cook an entire sheep once a year and is transportable by horse.
Incidentally, the Mongolians did not pay for the first stoves and I think that bill is still owed to UK government who obtained all of CRE’s assets when CRE was closed in 1995.
Richard
milodonharlani:
Thankyou for the correction you provide to my comment in your post at September 27, 2013 at 11:44 pm. I should have checked the date of Albert’s demise but did not. Mea culpa.
Richard
Mosher
I do not have a knee-jerk opposition to alternative energy per se. I am opposed to its forced imposition. The people of Lesotho looked at alternatives without pressure (1998 hydro power station opened.) Take Kenya and geothermal power in the Rift Valley for example. They aim to get 26% of their energy from geothermal by 2030 and its making good progress with 2 plants at Olkaria and another under construction.
PS India and China are making up for the shortfall in any co2 emissions from coal. 🙂
Absolutely! Expensive energy kills poor people. Well done, Willis.
Greenies are too bloody stupid to wrap their feeble brains around the concept. Or they don’t give a rat’s patootie about their fellow human beings. Or both.
We are in a race against time with regards to population. When people of developing countries get access to electricity, can educate more girls and see an improvement in their general standard of living they tend to have fewer children. Apparently watching soap operas on TV helps reduce fertility!
Kings and Queens still do have power in a constitutional monarchy, its just rarely exercised. Those occasions when it is exercised usually provoke a lot of excitement, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis
If a constitutional monarch were ever to declare the government unconstitutional, and demand the army obey its oath of fealty to the monarch, the result could well be civil war – though one could imagine such an event would only occur in a desperate emergency, to depose an already deeply unpopular government.