Lucky them: Spending big bucks on a Green Marshall Plan for Africa

Holy crap – these arrogant know-it-alls in their private jets just never learn. And – of COURSE – they’re not doing it via Zoom or, say, taking the 9:15 commuter they want us all on to Poughkeepsie.

THEY’RE IN PARIS

Climate change is driving world leaders to rethink the financial system that has underpinned the global economy since it was forged in the wake of World War II.

Our treasury gnome is on it – you’ll remember she went to Africa this winter to lecture to people who live in huts, and sell them on solar panels and wind turbines. Diplomatic coup if there ever was one.

So, Janet Yellen says we can “unlock $200B” in extra lending from “multilateral development” banks all over the world in the course of the next decade.

…Funding that transition would require the equivalent of 2% of economic output from wealthier countries, said Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and former administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Pfft. What’s money?!

…Taking on significant sums of riskier investments would be unfamiliar territory for the World Bank and national development institutions such as USAID. The World Bank and other multilateral development banks are reviewing whether they can lend more against their capital while still maintaining their AAA rating from credit agencies.

That is why delegates gathering in Paris billed the meeting as a “Bretton Woods for nature,” a reference to the 1944 meeting that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

I do not see that as auspicious, do you?

How do the Africans feel about yet another plan by wealthier Western nations to ram more solar panels and flotsam down their throats?

They haven’t had a chance to digest this latest yet – after all, Lord John Kerry of Lurch and his friends are still partying in the City of Lights (Ironic they chose Paris instead of, say, Pretoria, South Africa, no) – but there is already a fair amount of evidence that those developing nations have had quite enough of living in the dark and believe this is just another pile of Kudu poo.

As my Kenyan friend, and go-to source, Jusper points out, Africans have basically nothing that has caused any of the problems you want Africans to fix.

In fact, Africans use less of everything because they have no access to any of it, and much of that can be blamed on intrusive foreign aid loan policies coupled with the African penchant for corruption in government. They don’t need any more aid with strings – they need diesel, electricity, fertilizer, and tractors…

…and please stop telling them they don’t.

Africa is a continent of plenty that, if they could get the right kind of help vice social engineering based on what’s best/the current rage for Europe and the U.S., maybe they could start to get their act together and be self sufficient.

The Western mind seems sometimes to forget how impoverished many parts of the world still are. Electricity, a ubiquitous source of energy in the developed world, remains a luxury for billions of people who weren’t lucky enough to be born in the U.S. or Germany in the 21st century. Energy use per person would have to grow by a factor of 10 in Africa to reach the levels it was at in Germany in 1965, which is why billions of people cook for their families by burning animal dung. That practice causes extremely unhealthy air pollution and CO2 emissions, but for many, the only alternative to starvation.

You wouldn’t know it from how rich Westerners talk about their environmental goals, trying to ban gas stoves thanks to flimsy evidence of supposed health risks, when in fact, the world needs more gas stoves.

…For example, the World Bank has announced a major initiative to electrify Africa with renewables—a notoriously unreliable and intermittent source of electricity—while simultaneously refusing to support the use of nuclear energy, the most reliable form of electricity production. This matters, on many fronts.

…Africa holds 65 percent of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land, which would be enough to feed 9 billion people by 2050. This means that under the right conditions, Africa alone could potentially feed not only itself but the world’s population, which is assumed to peak at 9.7 billion in 2050.

Yet none of this seems to interest narcissistic Western environmentalists who continue to promote the absurd claim that adaptation to a changing climate is impossible for the poorest regions of the world, and the only solution is to stop economic growth in the North and mass migration from the South.

Oh yes. The assistant chief alarmist has been warning Africans on the dire consequences of using Fossil Fuels. I think he means it is far worse than hunger and poverty..
Only rich people can afford Carbon offsetting. https://t.co/WAQLXx0qrK https://t.co/cYWcBIV9Ev

— Jusper Machogu (@JusperMachogu) June 22, 2023

It’s colonialism from a Gulfstream over the Champs-Élysées.

“Green energy” impoverishing Africa. https://t.co/HfrlMlph4o

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) June 19, 2023

And it hurts Lurch personally when things don’t go his way here at home, you know – wounds him deeply that the Luddites can spike progress.

…“The president has tried,” said John Kerry, the Biden administration’s climate envoy. “He’s put that in the budget several times, and we just haven’t seen the Congress respond. But it would be urgently needed.”

Even as he wearily climbs aboard his private sky chariot, taking wing to yet another battle in the war on climate change.

I’m sure there’s a “For the African children” in there somewhere.

I don’t really think they’re interested.