By Vijay Jayaraj
In eastern Uganda, a mother can spend two hours a day gathering firewood to cook her family’s meals. Incredibly, 85% of Ugandan households still cook with wood and 13% depend on charcoal. Smoky indoor fires are estimated to cause thousands of premature deaths in the country every year, while clean-burning liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) reaches fewer than one home in a hundred. A billion sub-Saharan Africans are without clean fuel for cooking.
Standing between life and death is the European Investment Bank (EIB), the lending arm of the European Union that ended financing for fossil-fuel projects at the end of 2021. The World Bank runs a similar playbook. Last December, it issued a $200 million Clean Cooking Outcome Bond whose Ghana projects cover 245,000 electric cookers and 170,000 improved biomass stoves but not one LPG cylinder.
The body count Brussels ignores
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), household air pollution killed an estimated 2.9 million people in 2021. Soot from cooking fires has been blamed for nearly half of all deaths from lower respiratory infections in young children. Africa bears the heaviest share with an estimated 815,000 premature deaths a year.
WHO lists LPG and natural gas among the clean cooking fuels it wants expanded. The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects gas to supply more than 60% of the African households that gain access to clean cooking through 2040. Its roadmap calls for spending about $2 billion a year to introduce clean cooking to 80 million people annually.
So, the world’s leading health agency calls LPG clean. The world’s leading energy agency calls it the main pathway out of smoke. Which guidelines, then, are the EIB and World Bank following?
Gas for me, firewood for thee
Look inside a European home. The European Heating Industry counted roughly 76.4 million installed gas boilers across the EU in 2023. Liquid Gas Europe reported that LPG met the heating needs of more than 20 million EU citizens. Eurostat data show that natural gas still delivers nearly 30% of all energy consumed by EU households, more than any other source.
Did a single European family wait for a foreign lender’s blessing before trading coal stoves for gas burners in the last century? Of course not. Gas lifted Europe’s women out of soot-filled kitchens, and they have never looked back.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia supplied about 45% of the EU’s gas and LNG imports. Brussels condemned Moscow and imposed sanctions. Yet the bloc imported a record 106 million metric tons of LNG in 2025, with Russia ranking as its second-largest supplier at about 14%.
The buying did not slow even as the ban approaches. In the first half of 2026, EU buyers took a record 9.97 million metric tons from Russia’s Yamal LNG plant, worth more than $6 billion and 16% above the year before, stocking up ahead of the full prohibition that begins at the beginning of 2027.
The double standard extends to Europe’s closest partners. Norway, bound to the EU through the European Economic Area, places no ceiling on petroleum development. Oslo awarded 57 offshore production licenses in January, after issuing 53 in 2025 and 62 in 2024. Each license grants rights to explore, drill, and extract. Across six years, Norway has handed out 333 of them. You will search in vain for an EIB statement condemning any of it.
A bloc that pays a geopolitical adversary for gas has no moral standing to deny an African widow a cooking cylinder.
Patricia Nanteza, Africa coordinator at WePlanet, told the Monitor that LPG is the most accessible clean option families have in the near term and that lifting the ban would free more households from biomass. When climate campaigners themselves plead for financing of gas, the ban has lost its last defense.
The EIB and World Bank policies that protect their climate scorecards while African women devote half their lives carrying water and children are lost to early death. That trade carries no scientific, moral, or economic justification.
Originally published at American Thinker, October 19th, 2026.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
The hypocrisy of climate alarmists is truly infinite.
As is their hatred of women.
That has always puzzled me. Where would we be without women?
Speaking as a woman, I have no clue–nor does my husband.
“Let them eat smoke!”
— Greta Thunberg comment within the next 6 months
Methinks you give Greta too much credit.
It is CO2 she sees.
She is another one who hates women, even though she is one.
Allegedly.
Incredibly, the UK is on track to join them in abject poverty (via net zero) by 2030
My childhood home was heated with coal (Western Pennsylvania) until about 1950, then piped gas. I should have asked, but did not: Did the house have a wood or coal cook-stove? I have no recollection of this subject being discussed.
My great-grandmother had a wood cooking stove in her old farmhouse kitchen. Her children worried about the potential for fires, so they installed an electric stove right beside it. She would still fire up the wood stove occasionally (much to the consternation of her offspring) because she was familiar with the way it cooked.
The buying did not slow even as the ban approaches. In the first half of 2026, EU buyers took a record 9.97 million metric tons from Russia’s Yamal LNG plant,
What’s the betting that the “ban” gets delayed in 2027
Sounds like the impending bank sparked an increase in purchasing.
I have $10 in my pocket.
I will not bet on this one. You win. 🙂
I just saw an advertisement for wood – guy lives in country and says he heats and cooks with wood – a cut seasoned bundle for $8 – says his competition charges $10 to $12.
The US should not concern itself with what Europe does. People in Africa could use a lot of help, the US is in a position to give lots of help. Africa has a lot of resources the US can use. We should forget about foreign aid and concentrate on helping them develop their own resources. Consider the most responsible countries first, rank their needs and list their resources. US access to their resources would be considered payment for us helping them develop them and establish proper water supplies, proper waste disposal and proper energy supplies. Even if their resources aren’t high on our list we could sell them to those who do want them. Some may think this is pie in the sky thinking but it would be a damn site more helpful than all the money we have pissed away giving their leaders money. Plus we have some of the best people in the world to get the job done, I am not talking about our government.
Sadly, we have outsourced help to Africa to China. Notice that Elon Musk is now an American, formerly from South Africa. Could he be of some help to his continent?
How? By cutting funding to USAID ensuring that thousands of more kids die from HIV than necessary?
He is thoroughly hated by the ANC in SA, mainly because of his skin colour.
The US is forty trillion dollars in debt and has been passing hundreds of billions to Africa for generations.
My point exactly, we wouldn’t be giving them anything. We have things we can help them with and they have things we could use.
And then you bump up against a government of crazed communists like the ANC in South Africa who have no interest in improving the lot of their poor.
“Standing between life and death is the European Investment Bank (EIB), the lending arm of the European Union that ended financing for fossil-fuel projects at the end of 2021.”
What nonsense. If this was true then the people in Uganda would have had 60 years since becoming independent (59 if you want to be precise) to borrow money from the EIB and similar institutions to install LPG cookers etc. Which would have been plenty of time to install gas cookers across the entire country. The fact that they didn’t has a lot more to do with corruption and bad governance than a ban on such lending for the last 5 years.
Europe and the West have poured money and food aid into Africa for at least 50 years. The fact that things have not gotten much better and in places are much worse is not for lack of aid. So no one should blame us.
That is again nonsense. Western countries have extracted far more from African countries in interest for loans than they have ever given in Aid.
I recall this very topic being discussed exhaustively here on this magnificent web site. Similarly the topic that “Green” policies were really just keeping developing nations poor without ubiquitous, cheap and easy to use energy. The so-called high minded types felt that it was worth denying poor people a better life to reduce the future temperature by some tenths of a degree so the planet wouldn’t die. Amidst all the talk of crimes against humanity this is surely the worst and yet no-one will be held accountable.
I remember an environmentalist fad from three decades ago which touted •solar cookers• for sub Saharan Africa, in which parabolic reflector dishes were fitted with an arm and shelf to let African housewives boil a pot using focused sun rays, like we used to do as children with a magnifying glass on the sidewalk to light bits of paper afire. There were also cardboard boxes overlaid in aluminum foil to serve as ovens collecting solar heat from the sun. All this to obviate the need for burning any fuel at all.
Strange, you never hear about that any more these days. It was hailed so broadly one would have thought the entire continent should have been lifted out from poverty a quarter century ago.
Sigh.
I had an engineering professor who had slides of his beach barbecue grill. And it was aluminum foil over something to catch the sun’s rays to cook his burgers. As I recall, he also baked cookies on this contraption. Needless to say, it didn’t catch on with the students.