Essay by Eric Worrall
Climate Scientist Susan Chomba thinks the focus on renewable energy development is ignoring on the ground poverty issues.
‘Women bear the biggest brunt of climate change,’ says climate scientist Susan Chomba
She leads a team of 100 at a non-profit with operations across Africa and says climate has been seen through a male perspective for too long
Neha Wadekar in Baringo county, Kenya
Thu 22 Jun 2023 01.00 AESTSusan Chomba glares out the window of the Prado Land Cruiser at dozens of motorcycles speeding in the opposite direction. Each motorcycle carries at least five bags of charcoal and for every bag, at least three medium-sized acacia trees must be chopped down and burned. Charcoal production is banned in Kenya, but is still widely used for domestic heat and cooking.
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Roughly 12% of the world’s top climate scientists are women and fewer than one percent are from Africa – a continent hard hit by climate change. “If you look at the way the world operates, it’s almost blind to the fact that women bear the biggest burden and brunt of climate change,” Chomba says. That Chomba is an African woman in such a key role is potentially revolutionary, especially because she goes out of her way to solicit the views of those most affected and often most unheard – local farmers, community elders and, notably, women.
“The way climate is seen in the world, it’s seen very much from a masculine perspective,” Chomba says. For example, while male climate scientists focus heavily on developing renewable sources of energy to replace fossil fuels like oil and gas, Chomba believes they pay far less attention to the hundreds of millions of women worldwide who are burning wood for tasks like cooking. Incorporating the perspectives of women – particularly poor, rural women – would better ensure comprehensive solutions, she says.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/21/climate-scientists-susan-chomba-africa
If you shear away the climate rhetoric, Chomba has a point. A big solar farm does nothing to help people struggling to get enough water for themselves or their crops, or sacrificing their last trees for charcoal to sell, because they have no other means of income.
A few wells, maybe some microfinance loans to say buy a few sewing machines or whatever it is they need to address their basic problems, and perhaps some careful restoration of cover trees, would probably do a lot more for these people than a shiny new renewable installation next door to the Presidential Palace.
It’s a shame Chomba chose to dress these fundamental issues in liberal talking points. Maybe she has spent too much time hanging out with liberals? The liberal talking points upset me, my initial reaction to the article was hostile. This started out as a very different essay, until I reread what she said a few times.
Women, and trans, and blacks, and 3rd world countries, and…well, basically everyone that isn’t a straight white male American republican over the age of 40. How convenient.
I know, it messes with what should be a very straightforward and logical point about development priorities. I’m clinging to the hope she spouted that garbage because she’s hoping to attract funding from liberals, truly sad if its what she actually believes.
The problem isn’t climate change and the sooner Susan Chomba and her team of 100 get a clue, they might make some progress.
Now there is a journalistic task crying out to be unearthed! Find out who is funding a ‘Team’ of 100 across Africa. Soros maybe? More like Bill Gates who has his own Teams across Africa on other matters. It will be a faceless shell organization with complex pathways back to the money. Should be fun!
I’ve spent a bit of time in Africa in a number of decades and I can safely say this organization didn’t spring from the grassroots of this continent.
Oh, also find out where she got her degree, to see if she was taught her trade by these types:
“The way climate is seen in the world, it’s seen very much from a masculine
(White lefty climateer) perspective,”
She’s under the mistaken impression that communists show up to help.
Disha Shetty challenges one common claim in her Undark article: Do Women Really Make Up 80 Percent of All Climate Migrants? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The figure is frequently cited by activists, policymakers, and the media,
but it is a dubious statistic of murky origin.
My synopsis:
https://rclutz.com/2023/06/15/climate-refugees-imagined-statistics/
Good analysis.
I’d guess that no matter the percentage it’s still zero.
Is it not bizarre what leftists fixate on?
Actually no one “bears the brunt of climate change”. I’d love to see Susan Chomba or anyone else present unassailable evidence of someone who is suffering from a global temperature rise of a paltry 1 °C over the last century and a half or the glacially slow pace of sea level rise. Find us that poor, unfortunate soul so we can commisserate and give him (or her) a few bucks to help.
not everyone can live in a mild climate- basic fact too often ignored
Seems to me its been pretty darn hot in Africa for quite some time. The alleged warming is happening closer to the poles and not in tropical or subtropical climates. So what’s the issue?
How could one possibly imagine a solar array or a gaggle of wind turbines “next door to the Presidential Palace”?
Aren’t there solar panels on the roof of the White House. Exclusively to recharge the batteries on the first ladies’ vibrator.
The comment about trees and charcoal is interesting. I just was at a nationally known (USA) grocery and merchandise store. For $5.00 they sell a small bag of firewood. There are about 7 pieces, each 16 inches long. Here is a photo (from the web) of something similar but slightly larger.
These are sold for those with an in-house fireplace or a patio/backyard fire pit. Think party and special atmosphere or mood created watching the flames. There is so much wood in the forests of North America a person that has not hiked through for a dozen miles cannot begin to understand the amount.
Susan Chomba would benefit from the experience.
In Australia too, forests are producing so much extra growth due to all that aerial fertilizer, that there are consequently huge amounts of dead forest fuel and if burnt for energy would reduce wildfire risk and danger.
In Africa, of course, this already happens, plus anything they can get, because the people are so short of the luxury of F/F.
Anything with “Guardian” and “climate” in the URL is trash.
Elephants don’t like acacia trees, so if women and underprivileged minorities are turning the trees into charcoal, they’re just saving the elephants the trouble of knocking them down.
Fixed it for her:
“If you look at the way the world operates, it’s almost blind to the fact that women bear the biggest burden and brunt of climate change alarmism”
It’s not climate change that’s the issue here, it’s energy poverty and renewables will not help. The developing countries need high density energy sources instead of wood, dung or solar.
JohnC ==> well, at least one reader here understands the issue! Thank you.
And here I was thinking I had been told it was poor children that CO2 is targeting.
from the grauniad link:“Chomba loves trees. She can rattle off the scientific and local names of countless species and detail their ideal growing conditions. She holds a PhD in forest governance and master’s degrees in agriculture development and agroforestry.
So you’d imagine (my emphasis) that she’d understand soil erosion.
No she doesn’t, she in in fact a victim of it and doesn’t realise = a supposed full-sister of Gaia is not even female.
If those motorcycles had been carting rock-dust or silt taken from rivers, their estuaries/deltas or just offshore, what would she be saying then. What if the charcoal was going for biochar?
Why, of all God’s Critters, does she not know that the food we are supposed to eat doesn’t even need cooking. That the origin the the Ultra Romantic Candlelit Steak & Wine Meal was the sharing of fresh salted animal blood and raw still-warm liver? (Fat, Salt and Protein
Now utterly corrupted into sugar, alcohol and no salt
(Salt is bad for you and the ultra-trimmed fat-deficient steak becomes sugar when we digest it)
How do we know this: She is director of food, land and water programs, continent-wide, at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a global environmental research non-profit. She manages a portfolio of $20m and a staff of 100.
see her picture. admire that pose, read that body language. see the CV
She’s doing all the things boys do, quite successfully, yet relentlessly slags them off.
Is she actually envious of the (boys toys) motorcycles themselves?
Ask her and she will lie. She already did, we see it in her picture.
So why does she want to be equal with such horrible ugly things as boys?
How does she think she can ‘give’ (the definition of the Gaia female trait) yet first– she has to take take take….power control money
See now where a lot of the babies went and how much trouble we really are in.….
Real Boys would not be racing around on motorbikes – they would be happy getting their hands dirty (and bloody) in a garden and making girls happy with gifts they found, made captured there. A garden with trees yes, but a garden with buffalo, wild-boar, bambi, zebra, fishes and birds. A garden producing Real Food.
Not mush.
See her (and our) problem – sewing machines don’t grow on trees, don’t float or swim in rivers/lakes nor do you find them out grazing in a vast tree-infested grassland.
(“Vast” being the operative – think big. Think Very Big. Think: No Sewing)
Whenever I see Climate Change and Africa as the subject , I recall the reason for Live Aid in 1985 . At that time , the 44 million Ethiopian population were suffering an extended drought . So we raised millions of pounds to give them aid . Today , nearly forty years later , the population of Ethiopia is 114 million and has a thriving agriculture . Despite the fact that they suffer inter-tribal conflict, it is hard to detect a downside from the modest warming that the world has experienced . I think that perspective is what is lacking from the above .
Susan Chomba glares out the window of the Prado Land Cruiser at dozens of motorcycles speeding in the opposite direction.
Makes you wonder if Neha Wadekar in Baringo county, Kenya is taking the piss now doesn’t it.
The problems Chombra talks about are POVERTY problems — not climate change problems. Women and children in Africa (and most parts of the 3rd World) spend a great deal of their days fetching water and cooking fuels. This has nothing to do with climate change.
As local sources of cooking fuel are exhausted over time, women and children are sent further and further afield to obtain the necessary fuel. Water, in many places, is similar problem — fetched from afar, eitehr from a natural source or from the few public water faucets available.
This is the point of the Hartwell Paper, and much of Lomborg’s stuff. Pushing NetZero and renewables doesn’t resolve the problems of the poor — the poor need 24/7 electricity that they can afford. The poor need affordable fertiizers fro their crops.
Raising the poor up out of deep poverty with dignity is far more important than reducing GHG emissions.
But they think that talking “climate change” will result in money being sent to them to reduce poverty. They aren’t stupid but look for handouts. They should really be pushing private enterprise, low taxes for small businesses, electrification, housing development, trades training, road and rail construction….all things that allow people to make themselves wealthy and are financeable.
They should rather be pushing for the use of inexpensive appropriate technology, which has been available for decades, and as some friends in Zimbabwe who went from community to community in the rural areas offering short courses in woodworking and blacksmithing and the likes.
To be kind I will assume Dr Susan Chomba is well meaning but she is no climate scientist. Her main field is agriculture/forestry (her PhD is in forest governance). Her profile gives no indication that she has mastered any of the main sciences involved in understanding climate.
Chomba does notice pressing problems in Africa but wrongly attributes these to climate and has bought into the prevailing ideologies of the Western world. The institution she works for has among their aims enhancing gender equity and access to clean energy. She is an associate editor for political ecology – whatever that is – and global ambassador for the Race to Zero and Race to Resilience. She says in a recent tweet that she wants to tell “the stories of rural women in Africa, who . . . . . are buckling under the weight of climate change.”
I find it sad when a hard working adult is taken in by the alarmist and other ideological narratives. But even worse is the indoctrination of young African girls. An organization was started recently. Black Girls Rising trains girls in South Africa, between 12 and 18, to lead climate action in their communities. These girls think they can become African Gretas but are even more clueless about climate and weather. Many African countries alternate between droughts and floods but fail to capture and store the water during the wet years. What they now want to ascribe to climate change is no different from what I saw with my own eyes sixty years ago. In many instances populations have exploded but no new dams built for decades. Corruption, greed, incompetence and mismanagement – not to mention civil strife – are to blame and not climate.
So, with all the talk of “Pride” celebration in the news lately, I just have to ask the question: Does this mean that transgender individuals bear half-the-brunt of climate change?
The idiocy of this, it burns.
Indoctrination has its winners and losers. How will ISIS judge them?
From the article: “Roughly 12% of the world’s top climate scientists are women and fewer than one percent are from Africa – a continent hard hit by climate change.”
No. There is no evidence that human-caused climate change (that’s what they mean) has hit anyone hard, including in Africa.
And there is no evidence climate is any harder on women than it is on men, whatever its source. Women are not victims of CO2.
Story tip, drought and climate change in Kashmir is killing the saffron harvest
First, if you read her biography, she is clearly NOT a climate scientist. She is a forester. The Grauniad couldn’t even get that right.
Her work actually has little or nothing to do with climate change, although her bio lists it and she talks about it for obvious reasons (in order to get funding $$). She is more of a sustainable forestry / forest restoration specialist, a significant need in poor African nations, especially equatorial regions. Sad that the good work she is doing has to be compromised and her thinking clouded by the climate narrative.
Today, practically all earnest scientists are pressured to compromise their convictions for the sake of the climate change narrative, or else face ostracism and loss of livelihood. Of course, those having zero ethics (e.g., Mikey) have no problem with this.
We are looking at several different issues here, CAGW, solutions to CAGW, energy, deforestation, economics, politics and women’s issues.
The first is CAGW which is nonsense, we are not in a climate crisis, CO2 is not the control knob for earth’s climate and we are not going to reach a tipping point and face irreversible overheating.
The second is the proposed solution for our non problem, that would be replacing fossil fuels with renewables and ICE vehicles with EVs. Wind and solar cause far more problems than the energy source they are intended to replace. EVs are at least as bad a replacement for ICE vehicles as renewables are for fossil fuel.
The third is energy, Africa needs dependable, affordable and dispatchable energy. Renewables fit none of these, only fossil fuel and nuclear can do it.
The fourth is deforestation, if the population had access to fossil fuel and nuclear energy there would be no reason to cut down the forest for charcoal.
The fifth and sixth are so intertwined that you can’t reach one without the other. Many African governments are hopelessly corrupt, it is nearly impossible for a corrupt government to secure a sound economy. That is not something someone else can give you, it is something you have to create yourself.
The sixth is women’s issues, women’s lives would be immeasurably improved if a non corrupt government could ensure a sound economy and reliable and affordable energy.