Copy And Paste Solutions Will Not Save the Continent
Business Daily (Nairobi)
OPINION
13 August 2007
Posted to the web 13 August 2007
By Franklin Cudjoe
There is comic relief each time politicians try with desperate frustration to lay blame on other phenomena rather than themselves when problems arise.
Yes, climate change is an ongoing phenomenon, and given the 30 or so years that the climate of an area can be determined, what happens in the intervening years is very important.
Of greater importance is an aggregate of these climatic periods for say, the last 150 years. I chose the last 150 years for the purposes of comparison. 150 years ago, extremely hot climatic conditions were experienced globally. Incidentally, it was the same period associated with economic progress in the western world. Probably, most of Africa would have made use of its iron age, to develop too, were it left alone by colonialists.
History and climate science thus conclude that climatic optimums are associated with rapid economic growth whilst cooler periods are associated with low economic growth. In fact, about 30 years ago, climate alarmists predicted that the world was getting colder hence we were all going to be chilled. Today, the same alarmists say we are getting warmer and will be fried soon. The aggressiveness with which European countries have embellished the problem calling for tougher actions which have the capacity to derail economic progress in advanced countries is worrying.
Apart from making African poverty a Whiteman’s burden, I find it extremely disingenuous the attempt to make Africa appear helpless in fighting an extremely mythical war on climate, whilst it emits less of the so called green house gases and is confronted with the clear and present dangers of poverty, disease and corruption.Rather than combat climate change with technology, we have resorted to fear mongering and inability to pick from the limitless solutions at our disposal.
How did the world fight off the dengue fever, small pox and other dangerous diseases that reduced the global life span of humans to less than 40 years? What about the honesty of some of the noisiest supporters of fear-filled climate change? Former US vice-president Al Gore, a man, who through his Oscar winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, urged Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home was found to be using nearly 221,000 kWh of electricity a year, an amount nearly 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh).
Some environmental activists and rumour mongering NGOs are making the work of politicians easier by preventing them from focusing on practical adaptation measures to climate change.
Governments are rushing to set up questionable bureaucracies to fight off climate change because free aid money is assured.
Cudjoe is a director of Imani Humane Institute, Ghana
