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.
ecology has nice goals….save the planet, save the trees the bees, the sees and so on..but they just know a way to achieve it : let s be poorer… and they don’t understand why poorest people disagree…
Willis — “Expensive Energy Kills Poor People”
Mosher — “The Lesotho highlands power project (LHPP) will generate 6,000 megawatts (MW) of wind power”
Wind farms generate electricity at a high cost in rich countries, therefore it is extremely likely (implies 95% confidence) they are also expensive in poor ones. Are they ready to kill their own people on a multi billion dollar Chinese loan?
Genocide. You aren’t on a list. There isn’t a list, just reduction. Don’t take it personal.
Sand the edges, the high spots. No one will notice, too late when they do.
There is an issue that the World Bank and the US have to consider then denying loans to countries to build coal fired power stations. Deforestation. Willis has talked about this before and showed us a photo of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic – deforested Haiti, greener DR. My point is that if you stop people from burning coal they will burn something for cooking (with exception of solar cookers – no use on an overcast day.) Deforestation and loss of habitat with massive releases of co2 anyway is often the result. The cure could be worse than the disease.
Energy is life. Cheap energy is prosperity.
Here is Willis’ excellent article on Haiti titled
“How Environmental Organizations Are Destroying The Environment”
with a deforestation photo.
You CANNOT deprive the poor of energy until they have burnt everything. If you don’t believe me then go to Rwanda and cook without coal, petroleum, gas, dung, wood on a cloudy day. MASSIVE deforestation is the end result. An unintended consequence which can only make things worse.
Mosher — “The Lesotho highlands power project (LHPP) will generate 6,000 megawatts (MW) of wind power”
Maybe it will work being in the highlands I don’t know. What I do know from the article is this:
“Lesotho is to harness the power of wind and water in a $15bn (£9bn) green energy project”
“Nearly half of the 2 million population struggle to live on less than $1.25 a day”
“Construction is expected to take between 10 and 15 years”
Will the half of the population get the electricity subsidized? Lots of things are possible in this world, the issue is cost and efficiency.
“Expensive energy kills poor people.”
I couldn’t agree more. It’s not just wrong, it’s immoral.
A few years ago I was set to be a life-long Conservative voter. But no longer, I’m proud to be a UKIP voter now, like many other ex-Conservatives. I will never vote for a party whose energy policies are intended to push up the price of energy.
Of course, in the rich West we are far better placed to withstand this immoral nonsense, compared to large parts of the developing world, where there is real poverty. But even in Britain, these policies are killing old people who can’t afford these ridiculous energy bills.
At the very least, if I return to the Conservative fold they will have to scrap the Climate Change Bill. Not only is it the most expensive suicide note in history, the morons who voted it in are guilty of mass murder. And that means you, Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Davey.
Chris
In Britain the Government has a Plan
“This is because the government imposed closure program of coal and oil capacity is running to time, whilst the replacement new build program of low carbon generation is running 3 years late.”
Yes the plan is to close the countries power generation capacity faster than it will be replaced.
http://www.liberumcapital.com/pdf/AbwjyzrV.pdf
This is Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition, possibly Britains next prime minister, he also has a plan.
He’s just told those who would invest in new power stations that the country needs – You may not get your money back
This is a point Frederic Bastiat tried to get across 150 years ago, that when we force economic choices there are always unintended consequences for which we are responsible. I tried to get this point across in a more general sense at our Libertarian blog http://tinyurl.com/wind-babies
@Jimbo
“Apparently watching soap operas on TV helps reduce fertility!”
That’s a terrible price to pay for reducing the birthrate.
Willis,
Once again the Panicists ignore the inconvenient truth that carbon dioxide emissions must include the industrial consumption of limestone. Limestone is used to create Cement, Pig Iron (the limestone is used as a flux and is converted into slag) and Glass (the calcium oxide lime is created from limestone by thermal decomposition).
These industrial processes are used to create the concrete steel and glass buildings of our modern cities. They all rely on limestone as a feedstock to the chemical processes that creates the materials and the limestone so consumed emits into the atmosphere carbon dioxide gas from a non-fossil fuel source.
Philip Mulholland says:
‘…the limestone so consumed emits into the atmosphere carbon dioxide gas from a non-fossil fuel source’
I have always wondered why we cant extract c02 from the atmosphere and just make limestone. (I suppose it is too energy intensive, but I haven’t looked into it). It took a long time to figure out the Haber process, whereby nitrogen is taken out of the atmosphere to make fertiliser, so why cant we take c02 out as well, and just have massive new deposits of limestone? Obviously there must be a good reason, otherwise someone would have thought of it already.
Also, I suppose nobody has done the sums, but the amount of limestone has increased over geological time, so that has taken some c02 out of the atmosphere over time, reducing the earths temperature. There are loads of it in places, kilometres thick.
thingadonta:
At September 28, 2013 at 6:31 am you say
The US Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) funded a project to evaluate that idea a decade ago: it was part of their ‘Zero Emissions Project’ for coal-fired power. CO2 is more easily extracted from its high concentration in flue gases than from its lower concentration in air.
The idea is technically feasible but economically ridiculous especially now frac-gas is available.
And I think it is a bad idea to sequester CO2 (i.e. plant food) from the environment.
Richard
Philip Mulholland says:
September 28, 2013 at 6:16 am
I (somewhat) disagree; They DO know about the concrete (actually “cement production” requires the continuous mining, shipping, crushing, burning, packing and re-shipping of the limestone) and steel industries, but are attacking them less publicly. No less effectively, just much less publicly – and yet MORE effectively! – because these industries are second-tier and third-tier suppliers in a deliberaltey lower producing economy. (Besides, buildings, roads, and parking lots ARE the “enemy” and should be destroyed and blown up in these people’s minds.) As second and third tier industries in the more-commercialized west, the extra costs, extra supply delays, and extra unneeded restrictions are “hidden” in the higher prices more generally required by these peoples’ desires to kill the world’s peoples in general, and western economies in particular. Also, since people don’t “see” the costs of higher price concrete and steel in their month-to-month bills, and don’t “see” the impact of higher-priced buildings and have already “got” the sewage pipes and sewage treatment plants and water pipes underground, politicians can re-regulate them almost at will in the CAGW schemes for the west.
As primary industries in the second and third world, higher prices and less production of steel, concrete, railroads, bridges, power lines, dams, irrigation canals and tunnels and buildings IMMEDIATELY restricts the ability to provide the roads, bridges, rails and power lines to START providing clean water and reliable transportation and sewage and heat and food. Make sense? The feedback loop pointed out above several times STARTS with the restriction of CO2 “globally” as “A VERY GOOD THING” by the global community’s propaganda.
The deaths required by the CAGW religion occur far away from its supporters.
The sewage and water investments of the 1920’s in the US and Europe FOLLOWED the localized power lines and localized good roads of the 1910 and early 1920’s. Trolleys, street cars, railroads came first, then good roads. Then highways well later. Rails were common across the US by 1850, and that industry was worldwide before electricity was “invented” as a service in the 1890’s.
Thingadonta
Limestone is the Earth’s natural safe store of carbon dioxide gas in a solid mineral form. Limestone is formed in the oceans from dissolved calcium. The presence of excess calcium in solution is the reason why the oceans are alkaline. The calcium comes from the mineral breakdown of igneous basalt rock. The limestone rocks of Earth are the reason why our planet is not and never will be like Venus.
Expensive energy kills people, so does deindustrialization and energy reduction schemes.
The deindustrialization and reduction in power production and power generation resulting in the strangulation of our economies. As this process continues we will not be able to support our current populations.
In fact the current policy of deindustrialization and reduction of energy use will result into a slaughter house.
The proof of this claim is not only written down in scientific reports that studied the connection between energy use and prosperity and population health.
All one has to do is take a look at the history, starting with WW II which in 1943 saw the Morgenthau Plan surface as a permanent solution to disable Germany’s capacity to wage war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan
“The plan’s program, the memorandum concluded, “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”[2]
News of the existence of the plan was leaked to the press.[3] President Roosevelt’s response to press inquiries was to deny the press reports.[4]
In wartime Germany, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was able to use the plan to bolster the German resistance on the Western front.[5]
In occupied Germany, the thinking behind the Morgenthau plan was reflected in the U.S. occupation directive JCS 1067[6][7] and in the Allied Industrial plans for Germany aimed at “industrial disarmament”,[7] designed to reduce German economic might and to destroy Germany’s capability to wage war by complete or partial deindustrialization and restrictions imposed on utilization of remaining production capacity. By 1950, after the virtual completion of the by then much watered-down “level of industry” plans, equipment had been removed from 706 manufacturing plants in the west and steel production capacity had been reduced by 6,700,000 tons.[8]
Partly for the sake of lowering German standards, restrictions were also enacted on food relief imports.
According to some historians the U.S. government formally abandoned the Morgenthau plan as promoted occupation-policy in September 1946 with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes’ speech Restatement of Policy on Germany.[9]
Unhappy with the Morgenthau-plan consequences, former U.S. President Herbert Hoover remarked in a report dated 18 March 1947:
“There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.” [10]
It is argued that it was Hoover’s March 1947 statements in his report that led to the end of the Morgenthau plan and to a change in U.S. policy.[10][not in citation given]
In the seventies, after the Club of Rome produced her “doom report” about the future of human kind and the ecology of the planet, not being able to sustain unlimited population growth due to pollution and lack of resources, the UN again pulled the concept of deindustrialization from the shelf again resulting in the 1975 Lima Declaration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG6yoqVZXdk
Because earlier treaties like the 1933 treaty of Montevideo (about a frame work of responsibilities of Nations) and the UN declaration of Human Rights have created a legal framework of human rights, protection from Government violence and the punishment of those responsible for genocide, the establishment had to find a way to escape any legal consequences of a structural reduction of the world population. The economic collapse of the Global Economy, creating a situation of absolute chaos and the creation of a “higher moral argument (Saving the Planet) read “Green Agenda, Agenda 21, have created the basis for a planned genocide of mind boggling proportions.
The fact that UN papers describe the use of euthanasia in order to prevent further “pain and suffering” of those who have become “obsolete or starving” speaks for its self.
It is no accident that the UN chapter of Human Rights is under siege from Islamic member states and it is no accident that the establishment has allowed Islamic extremism to advance western immigration policies and by the planned process of “replacement of government” as we observed in countries like Iraq, Libya, Tunis and Egypt and the western support of the Muslim Brotherhood. All contribute to chaos and the collapse of the Western civilization
There is absolutely no limit to the evil mind set of those in power and those of you who still believe that the atrocities committed by the the regimes from Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol-Pot during times of war but also during times of peace, have been the darkest events in history of human kind, think twice.
Our darkest day’s are still ahead of us.
Never in the history of human kind there have been so many means available to exterminate people and never in the history of human kind there have been so many technological developments to control humanity and prevent opposition. Central control over all these assets by people with a dark and evil mindset, people who, despite a total lack of scientific evidence still believe human civilization and population growth is a cancer to the planet IMO is a guarantee for a pending genocide.
As we have learned from the Morgenthau Plan the current policy of deindustrialization and the policy plans for continued reductions in energy consumption should be regarded as clear evidence of the real intentions of our current establishment as all these measures now have been casted into laws, regulations and penalty system in case of non complience (Europe).
The current process to corrupt science and sustain a belief system only underlines the current process underway.
The reality is that the doors of the next slaughterhouse already have opened.
The knives have been sharpened, the guns and the ammunition has been produced and stored, the suppression machinery well trained and equipped, divide and rule doctrines in place and smoke curtains laid.
The establishment has openly declared war on humanity and those who are bound to die soon still don’t get it.
This won’t be a war with heroes.
This will be an act of cold extermination where people will be fleeced from any human dignity.
The status of people reduced to a status less than that of a chicken in a factory farm.
If we fail to change the mindset of the current powers in control of the UN and our Governments, if we fail to restore the process of corruption of science, the corruption of our “free” press, the corruption of our financial institutions, if we fail to defeat the current political leadership of our nations, who stopped representing the interest of their people a long time ago and if we continue to accept the continuing process destroying our privacy, our civil rights and the constitutions of our nations, we’re done.
The gun has been fired, the bullet is underway…
Time is running out quickly.
Europe today is as close to economic collapse as it can get now the German Bank has advised its customers to bet against the Euro currency in order to secure their assets. http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2013/09/26/deutsche-bank-empfiehlt-wetten-gegen-den-euro/
Inspired to dig deeper, I headed off to that font of all basic knowledge – The CIA Fact book.
As one might expect, I’m now more confused than ever. (all numbers are from The CIA Fact book unless otherwise stated) …
The Grun article talks of 10 GW (6 Wind and 4 Hydro) installed capacity. Ok so far except that their total consumption is 293 million kWh (2009 est). Worse still the country exports 0 kWh (2010 est.) but imports 121 million kWh (2010 est.). The Grun article is dated October 2011 so we
can give and take on the numbers.
As somebody competent in mathematics you see my problem already and that is just electricity…
let’s not go to ‘fossil fuels’ … it has none and apparently uses next to none.
I’m suspecting an unregulated economy where, for example, Coal is brought home via ‘gassed up’ SA registered trucks and none of it is ever seen in the statistics.
Something is severely wrong with ‘the facts and figures’. Why would they install 10GW capacity (2011) to service a demand of 293 million kWh (2009) for example?
I’m confused and if anyone has any newer and more reliable figures then I will gladly look.
dp: The power grid in Lesotho is all but non-existent outside the city cores where about 25% of the population lives.
Not to dispute (which I do on other occasions), but do you have a link? Lack of grid is another factor in the solar option, which I write about for niche applications and places without grids. It takes longer to get the permitting for the gird than for the other parts of large, centralized systems. Most of their hydropower must be exported along with the water.
Excellent points, Willis. With the US and the World Bank not funding coal or gas fired electrical generating plants for poor countries, I’m surprised there isn’t some foundation or another willing to go ahead with just such a project. Have all the so-called philanthropist funds been co-opted by the Malthusian green socialists? I know many have been. Why would Belinda Gates’s, Turner’s, Rockefeller’s and other prominent “philanthropist” organizations toe the line on this stuff. What use is curing people of AIDS or malaria or what have you if you are prepared to freeze impoverished people or deny them access to economic development? How can the UN and other aid agencies in good conscience commit this heinous crime.
Where are the protesters who would be out there on every campus and in front of government, embassy and industry headquarters if a mine’s tailings were to contaminate a poor country’s drinking water, but have no problem with officially denying access to life giving electric power and an acceptable economic level for these people. I think that it is high time some organization held a conference in Africa or created a new fund and an information newspaper to inform poor countries of this unconscionable consensus policy that is apparently designed to save the grandchildren of elitists by sacrificing the children today of the poor. Hello, is anyone there?
“Yes the plan is to close the countries power generation capacity faster than it will be replaced.”
Don’t worry. They’re apparently now paying companies millions and millions of pounds a year to keep diesel generators ready to come online when they close the real power plants and the windmills aren’t working.
The stupidity of replacing coal and nuclear plants with diesel generators is just mind-boggling.
Climate Solutions in Seattle is doing their damnedest to stop development of coal export terminals. They base their actions on AGW, coal dust, and long trains through our “neighborhoods”.
I have to wonder what their thoughts would be if those trains were moving grains? I am sure they would say that is a good thing, right?
So we can ship them grain but not the energy to process it???
Oh Willis, haven’t you learned anything. Expensive energy means we can return to the simpler times of the primitive noble savages. The groundbreaking thesis Dances with Wolves explains this all very clearly. We don’t need oil to heat our furnaces because we will be wrapped in the warmth of love and peace.
Now obviously this utopia is more for you than me, I don’t particularly want to die at 50 so I’ll partake in the massive carbon producing hospitals and evil big “pharma”. But I’ll curse their evil ways until the end. It might be hard for you to understand now how this de-evolution is good for you now, but trust us… We know what’s best.
Willis,
Thanks for this and your many other thoughtful interesting articles. Glad you, your beautiful ex-finace’ and daughter had a nice trip.
Rich