Josh How to Starve Africa: Ask the European Green Party
Jun 8, 2016 Bureaucrats EU Green Blob Greens Posted by Josh
I read this today on Risk-monger.com
There is a commonly shared neo-colonialist expression: The Europeans have the watches; the Africans have the time. Today, the European Green Party, with the support of countless environmentalist NGOs, proposed an initiative in the European Parliament to make Africa wait for at least another generation to be able to lift itself out of poverty.
It's a shocking read and ends:
A sad day for Africa
Today, in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, MEPs voted “overwhelmingly” by 577 MEPs, with only 24 against and 69 abstentions to accept the Green Party’s Heubuch Report and demand that the European Union stop funding the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. It is with great hope that the world ignores this unfortunate act, considering it as a narrow-minded gesture towards appeasing a backward looking European green constituency.
In 2015, after 30 years of residence in the Brussels area, I became a Belgian citizen. Today, for the first time since officially becoming a European, I was ashamed of what ill-guided people in the European Parliament had done in the name of Europe. This act of selfish science denialism (with the potential for massive negative consequences) is no way for reasonable Europeans to act.
We need to let Africa have the chance to develop, not on our terms or demands, but on theirs. It is time to give Africans the watch and let them manage their affairs on their time, not ours.
Shame on Maria Heubuch and her band of eco-religious missionary zealots.
Shame on our MEPs too. Read the whole thing here.
Reader Comments (156)
Still no comment from Phil C.
All a bit too "inconvenient" for you Phil?
david smith. I don't think Phil is interested in European Parliament politics, except when it comes to funding his climate science addiction. Work on African climate change is all that is needed to assure future prosperity for the region. Why should he stoop so low as to answer your impertinent question?
David Smith
Martin A is right. Interacting with climate sceptics I learn a lot of new vocabulary.
I recently encountered "special snowflake syndrome"
Phil Clarke may choose to answer, but you have no god-given entitlement to an answer.
Entropic Man,
Shouldn't you be brushing up on logarithmic mathematical relationships and how to calculate using logarithms?
If you extrapolate a straight line to graph the European Cup violence between Friday and Saturday, you will be predicting WW3 by the final next month.
Yep Ok Alan
Climate Alarmism Brexit Alarmism are linked
Project Fear in the EU Debate
Project Fear in the Climate Debate
Same Project Same Fear Same people saying it.
Ironic how the fate of Europe decided whilst in the middle of a European Football competition marred by violence the threat of terrorism, and scandal.
This is as a science not a political blog obviously
But it's the politics corrupting t he science.
Rotational fine structure
Hello, snowflake.
EM.
Hello Mandelbrot, or are you Julia or a Fitou this week? Feeling like a snowflake, lace or dust? So much for climate scientists to learn about the chaos they have wrought.
Who would have thought that the Bishop and his boys and girls would support an international/intergovernmental public-private partnership initiative by the "New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa", the G8, the African Union, the "New Partnership for African Development" and a "Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme" to interfere in the lives of countless farmers and peasant across the whole of sub-saharan Africa? You'll be cheerleading for the United Nations next.
During the next African famine, the locals will be asking why nobody listened to their needs, rather the needs of clueless politically driven 'scientivists'.
Raff.
Make no mistake this thread has everything to do with being anti EU, and perhaps little to do with the plight of African farmers. If the EU Parliament had supported the measure, BH may even have been against it, perhaps even using your words - interfering "in the lives of countless farmers and peasant(s) across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa". Some here believe we should do nothing to help, merely buy their goods.
Do you think BH is anti UN? I have seen little evidence for this
golf charlie, that sounds like the sort of objection raised in Heubuch's report. Do you even know on which side of the argument you stand?
Alan Kendal, "Some here believe we should do nothing to help, merely buy their goods." Yes, at the same time as some skeptics (seems like many, but maybe I've been unfortunate) like to say that trade fixes poverty, there will be support for Trump railing against jobs being exported to all those rotten people who want to sell things to the US.
"Do you think BH is anti UN? I have seen little evidence for this"
Are you serious? Ask people to give a good word for the UN. There's folk here who claim all foreign aid is harmful (Martin A for example) and when I've argued against this in the past I've got no support. I'd say anti-UN sentiment is as rife as anti-EU.
50 gays machine gunned to death in Orlando and another 50 injured by an Islamic Terrorist.
So do President Obama and Hilary Clinton still think that Global Warming is the biggest threat to U S National Sercurity
So Entropic any droughts in Florida lately?
Raff. I meant exactly what I wrote. I have seen LITTLE evidence to support the view that BH is essentially anti-UN. I have seen the occasional, almost off the cuff, negative comment, but I suppose the concentration of interest in the EU in recent months will has obscured any UN bias.
You say you have had little support in the past. Try me.
I know many of the arguments regarding foreign aid, having mentored many undergraduates who pursued a combined environmental science and development studies degree programme. This degree was begun at UEA following my suggestion and I was its first degree programme director.
Alan Kendall, I haven't been around BH much for some time, so maybe it has changed. I doubt it though. Much, perhaps most, climate skepticism is from people of the right, anti-government, small state, libertarian, etc and the UN is anathema to people with such views. The (caricatured) view here seemed in the past to be that all we need to do is build coal fired power stations in Africa (but not with our money, you understand), let them buy coal from us ad-infinitum and trade with them (but not export our jobs to them, you understand) and African poverty will disappear. And I haven't found anyone who would argue that aid can be beneficial. You doubtless know more about development, aid and such than I could hope to, so maybe I'll just enjoy watching you argue against that set of views.
I have lived and worked amonst people who have suffered the best and worst of the EU, UN, NATO and the rest of the alphabet soup.
Those 'on the ground' 'closest to the action' etc, whether soldiers, aid workers, religious leaders etc always have contempt for those 1000s of miles away, making wrong decisions, too late.
If the money and resources wasted on fighting CO2 had been better spent, large parts of Africa could have been better able to cope with a rising population.
Communities with the technology and ability to turn a light on and off, at will, at night, have lower birth rates. Go figure.
golf charlie,
"If the money and resources wasted on fighting CO2 had been better spent, large parts of Africa could have been better able to cope with a rising population."
Go on, tell us how that would have happened. For example for diverting the UK spending on renewables to Africa, would you raise the money through a levy on electricity supplies, as with renewable subsidies, or would you just use general taxation. And what would you spend it on, where, and how would you prevent corruption and theft that have been a problem with other aid efforts. How would this effort differ from previous aid?
EM
" Phil Clarke may choose to answer, but you have no god-given entitlement to an answer."
I didn't say I was entitled to an answer. If Phil C is running away from answering my question (cause I'm sure he's reading this), that's up to him.
AK @ 11:12
You're probably right. Phil C thinks that stopping CAGW(TM) is the answer to world peace and nirvana upon Earth. He believes windmills and solar panels will bring health, wealth, and prosperity to all.
Raff how much money has been wasted providing salaries to developing countries to attend climate change conferences? How many lives have been saved per AirMile?
You seemed to have returned on full blown attack mode. Are your sponsors getting worried?
Raff (6.16pm) is essentially correct. Britain, among few other countries follows strict guidelines for its foreign aid, and abides by them, spending a defined percentage of its GDP. But its a pittance compared with what is needed. Any savings made by reducing subsidies and the like would be ploughed back into general government spending. It certainly would not go to increasing aid beyond the agreed percentage. British aid is also not as unselfish as it might at first seem. Commonly aid is "given" but only on the condition that the money is used to purchase British goods or services. Other aiding countries, specially China, do not impose those conditions.
Alan Kendall, when Iran was the bad guy, and Iraq was the good guy, the UK aided Iraq. Wikipedia has a piece on "Arms to Iraq".
Historically the UK has provided all sorts of UK goods and services as "Foreign Aid" whether it be engineering advice or a fleet of Landrovers. It can do badly wrong, but at least there is something physically to see.
Providing funding for countries to have a Climate Change Dept with a fleet of Mercedes, so they can attend climate change conferences and bleat about poverty due to climate change, as people die through lack of medical aid, food, water and power is a bit sick, especially when 'The West' has been told not to provide money for coal fired power stations.
If I was involved with one of those countries, I would want to meet the Chinese Ambassador, knowing that the EU, USA UN etc would only want to offload some useless windmills or other rubbish that nobody else wants.
“Who would have thought that the Bishop and his boys and girls would support an international/intergovernmental public-private partnership initiative …”.
============================================
By the same token who would have thought the “Green Party, with the support of countless environmentalist NGOs” wouldn’t?
The argument being put is a red herring and where did the UN come from, it’s not mentioned in the article.
Maybe it is the very absence of that corrupt organisation (its creature the IPCC apparently infested with green ideologues) and the inclusion of Coca-Cola with various Africa-based agribusinesses that makes this initiative attractive, or at least not unattractive, to (cheap jibe) “his boys and girls”.
Christopher Hanley
1. Do you really believe the UN can be described as corrupt - what all of it?
2. What's wrong with Coka Cola being altruistic (assuming it is not just flogging its products)?
3. Agribusiness involvement might ensure monies are spent wisely and are not spirited away for nefarious purposes. Why should BH, or anyone, not be in favour?
"I'd say anti-UN sentiment is as rife as anti-EU"
So 46% of the UK population then according to the FT poll of polls today. Not exactly minor.
Perhaps coca cola are involved because of its usefulness as a natural and cheap pesticide;
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/pesticide.asp
JamesG.
Coca Cola is NATURAL?????!!!!!!
Pull the other one.
If you had mentioned its metal cleaning properties, I might have believed you.
Have you ever seen what it does to dirty coins?
AK
Well if you read the link you'll see what I meant by natural; ie it attract ants which then kill the larvae.
JamesG. It was you that called coca cola a natural pesticide - one that I now discover reliles on attracting ants!
At my age I have few spare brain cells so don't look up all suggested websites. Currently, I'm heavily involved with moles, flint and horse sizes (over at unthreaded) and conducting an attritional war with golf Charlie protecting my home county Norfolk.. I have little time for probable other uses for coke. Sorry.
Raff's recent posts give amazing if accidental insights on just how poor the thinking skills of the climate obsessed can become.
It seems Raff missed the line:
"We need to let Africa have the chance to develop, not on our terms or demands, but on theirs. It is time to give Africans the watch and let them manage their affairs on their time, not ours."
It maybe makes folk feel superior when shouldering the white mans burden but its somewhat better to ask Africans what they need - if anything - rather than tell them what we think they need and actively prevent them from getting what they actually need which is what the World bank and the IMF have been doing lately......and now the EU joins the chorus of the ignorant.
JamesG. Beautiful words but can you trust them? If Greens agree with such sentiments (and why should they not?)
why were they opposed to the measure and why were they able to persuade an overwhelming number of other MEPs to oppose it or, what is tantamount to the same thing, not support it?
Before you accuse others of missing important aspects of the matter, do you understand it, and if you do, will you share it with us? No response yet from my nearest MEP
JamesG, amazing how the Greens grow fat, profiting out of perpetuating the starvation of others. Solar panels supplied to remote villages for charging non existent mobile phones, would be more useful if they could be designed to be used as spades. Supplying them with spades designed to be used as a spades, would be cheaper, and they wouldn't need plugging in. This is technology that an agricultural community needs to survive, and the lack of instructions or an annual maintenance and management fee won't worry them.
JamesG, as I said to golf earlier, what you write sounds like the sort of objection raised in Heubuch's report. Do you even know on which side of the argument you stand?
And as for equating opinion at BH with that of the UK public:
Raff: "I'd say anti-UN sentiment is as rife as anti-EU"
JamesG: "So 46% of the UK population then according to the FT poll of polls today. Not exactly minor."
you must be dreaming.
golf Charlie. Solar panels are commonly used to power small refrigerators used to store medicines. Mobile phones in areas of poor infrastructure are used to make contact with small otherwise unconnected communities. Technologies can be misused but also can be absolutely essential. The trick is to look behind media coverage (all too often focussed on negative stories).
Spades can usually be constructed cheaply out of local materials.
Alan Kendall, I am very much in favour of back pack portable water desalinators/purifiers and solar and wind generators with some battery back up. As a sometime yottie, I have some familiarity with the technology, though have never had to rely on it to keep myself alive.
For emergency deployment, more should be available, but wind and solar can not be relied on to power life sustaining supplies of electricity.
A desalinator is often referred to as a watermaker by yotties. A watermaker makes potable water out of seawater, not fresh air!
golf Charlie. You may say that people should not have to rely on solar/wind. But commonly there is nothing else. Solar, once installed, is essentially free. Installation costs are comparable with small diesel generators (or cheaper). Poor communities cannot afford costs of fuel, and maintenance costs of solar are very low. Small solar has been a godsend. It may not be appropriate in the UK, but in northern Kenya (where I have seen it) it is definitely the best method of generating electricity.
Every time I read solar berated here in BH, I think of northern Kenya.
Bish
Around this theme
"This is where your money's going when you give it to World Vision in Laos"
http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2016/06/this-is-where-your-moneys-going-when-you-give-it-to-world-vision-in-laos.html
Alan kendall (10:19 AM) you have misinterpreted my remarks by a full 180 degrees.
Christopher Hanley
Cannot see where I have. Paraphrasing your important sentence (tell me if this is incorrect) "The absence of the corrupt UN, and the inclusion of coco cola and African agribusiness may all make the initiative attractive to denizens of BH".
So I asked if the UN was totally corrupt?, why shouldn't coco cola be altruistic? and if the inclusion of agribusinesses might be beneficial? Are you now claiming i) the UN is not corrupt, ii) coco cola's involvement will be a negative, and iii) agribusinesses will not be beneficial?
Who is misinterpreting whom?
I think of Kenya and how people, when they can access grid power, choose to do so. And the economic benefits of grid power follow
Alan Kendall 7:11, I agree with what you say. Small communities can benefit from them, but when they are Unreliable, the community may suffer catastrophic failure. Then you need a reliable source of energy as a back up.
Economies of scale economics do weird things in generating electricity. A family or two, whether in a thatched mud hut or yacht can plan ahead and use wind and solar as 'free' energy, using as much as is available, when it is available, but the cost of storing 12 hours worth of 'good supply' to give even 6 hours of power delivery on a windless night are prohibitive.
Rationing energy, food and water on a large scale is disastrous, and quickly leads to a breakdown of law and order, riots and warfare. Part of the original idea of the 'Common Market' was to avoid such shortages occurring.
The South Downs village I am from got mains water in the 30s. There is no gas or mains drainage, Broadband is not 100% coverage, nor is mobile phone coverage. Electricity is from above and below ground cables, so when a tree falls over, either it's roots or branches will cause a power cut, and probably take out the phones and Internet aswell. There is a substantial concrete block outside which had a generator on it for electricity until the 20s/30s? As a child I remember remote farms using tractors/landrovers/stationary engines to power generators some of which must have been ex-Wartime. The storm of 1987 left the village without electricity water and electricity for a week (ish?) . The downsides of Downland living!
I am in my early 50s, but do have some practical experience of living in the UK without any services at all! Preventing remote villages anywhere in the world from developing above a level of subsistence farming, is a crime against humanity, and most of those advocating it have no idea what they are actually doing to peoples lives.Deaths due to weather related crop failure will still happen, and technology can not solve everything, but some people like to be able to have some disasters to blame on global warming.
The BBC are banned from Zimbabwe, and little news gets out, about the total political mismanagement of that country, by a selfish few. The Green Blob offer no explanation of how their plans are different for the rest of Africa, and won't end up the same.
It was good that minority white rule ended in Rhodesia. It was good that corrupt Governments were overthrown in Libya, and Egypt too, and regime change is required in Syria, but before, nobody was dying of, or fleeing starvation and death.
Of course, Western charities, NGOs etc just want to blame everything on Global Warming, and have no evidence. How can their opinions be trusted by outsiders, let alone the local populations?
I would imagine that for the people's of Africa their priorities would be as follows:
1) Essential for life, subsistance
Food and water.
Shelter and basic fuel for cooking and heating.
For any further development plus quality of life; a reliable and cheap form of energy is essential. When our continent went through this process there were no idiot theories about man made catastrophic warming and so our decisions were easy to make. Right now Africa is a democratic industrial powerhouse still waiting to be born, the obstructions are western politics and environmental fanatics.
Dung, I would imagine you are right!
I think that is why so much money has been spent on salaries for Africans to tell their people how Global Warming is all the fault of everyone else, and by using emotional blackmail, they can all extract more free money, and the more deaths blamed on global warming, the more money for those left alive.
Global Warmists never shy from printing ridiculous scare stories for cheap publicity, so this one should be allowed to run, to see how vocal the Green Blob are, if they have to get proper jobs in the absence of free money.
golf Charlie. Your mentioning of your rural setting is interesting for this discussion. However there are huge differences between it and an impoverished village in the poorer parts of Africa. When power is interrupted in your village, the inhabitants probably feel it more severely. Lives are disrupted. In an African village that never has had mains power, the absence is not really felt. So if solar provided electricity is unavailable at night, so what? The villagers usually sleep and don't require electricity then. Even when days are overcast in the tropics, light intensities are commonly sufficient.
Introduction of electricity is commonly a very mixed blessing. Exposure to the outside world commonly causes discontent in the young, and the brighter of them leave, never to return. Many isolated villages are now almost entirely composed of the elderly. There are also problems in cities where migrants arrive and fail to find their dreams.
At least the proposal being discussed in this thread, flawed though it is, offers a chance for rural development that might keep young people in gainful employment locally.
I don't think some commentators here have any idea of what conditions are like in poorer parts of Africa. People live a barely subsistence existence, and if harvests fail they have absolutely nothing. A former colleague runs field trips to northern Kenya, and in recent years with the rains failing, they find the people starving. People she has known have died from starvation in the intervening year. Students spoke to these people about their lives in exchange for bags of flour- the most precious thing they could give. These people couldn't care less about electricity, they need food.
Alan Kendall, I have not been as as far south in Africa to see the Sahara, but since the 70s, through family, friends etc, the high and lows, successes and failures of colonial Africa, post colonial Africa, civil wars, bloodshed etc has had an eerie knock-on effect on aspects of my life.
Live Aid etc was when I was at University. African students shared the sadness about the Sudanese famine, but pointed to all the other societal breakdowns that paved the way for a drought to cause so many deaths. There were some heated arguments among those students, about stuff I didn't understand, and can't really remember, but politics, greed, corruption were recurrent themes. After Live Aid, and all Geldorf's efforts, plus the generosity of the UK people, there were tears of joy, thanks, bemusement, bewilderment, gratitude etc etc, and more anger directed at those that had exacerbated the famine. Very mixed emotions all round, and I have not fogotten them!
Blocking the construction of reliable power stations, to save the planet, makes me somewhat irate.
When a powercut happens in the UK, for most, life stops. A reliable economy requires reliable power. Kids can't go to school if they have to farm, and they don't learn at night, without reliable lighting. It is that simple.
Alan Kendall
Please correct me if I misquote you but you seem to have said that because people in African villages may always have had to down tools when it got dark, then it does not matter if we continue to deprive them of the energy that could change their lives for the better?
"I am very much in favour of back pack portable water desalinators/purifiers and solar and wind generators "
golf charlie 6:42 pm
So that's why he wears a propeller beanie!
I recall Matt Ridley saying that the only people who favour subsistence agriculture are those who've never done it and those who've never done anything else.
The Greens and the EU do have a skerrick of truth on their side for once.
Kids displaced from small land-holdings aren't going to be able to go to college; they'll go to the gutters as part of the same 'flight to the cities' that the West endured under the same circumstances.
It was for us, and will be for them, a time of horrific social change, Dickensian hardships and squalor. The only thing worse for them as a society would be not going through that change.
Not that we have any role in limiting what Africans may choose for themselves, but rather our experience shows us the short-term obstacles ahead of them. Human decency compels us to be prepared to offer assistance in coping with the consequences of their choice. It is the case that mega-farming is the better choice- but it is not a choice with no adverse effects.
I'm delighted to have been introduced to 'the risk-monger's blog'. I agree with almost everything he says, but in this small area he has wrongly elided from the idea that children working on farms can't do much study to the false idea that children displaced from farms will have access to higher education.
Dung Do you genuinely not understand what I have written or are you deliberately twisting my words? The jury's out.
I wrote:
1. People who have never had mains electricity, don't miss it.
2. Solar power has been incredibly important and we should not judge it negatively because we might oppose renewable energy in the UK.
3. People with nothing have no need of light at night. What will they do with it? Only golf Charlie came up with a possible answer - use it to allow more time for learning. But there are other forms of light, like burning animal fat.
You write about "changing their lives for the better". In whose judgement - yours imposing western values, or theirs who experience all of the changes, good and bad? Ask the elderly villagers left behind when the younger leave.
People should never be "pickled in aspic" but neither should western values be imposed. Helping the less developed world* is not simple.
*Terminology is important. "Developing World is inappropriate because some of it isn't. "Undeveloped World is frankly insulting. "Less Developed World" seems to be the best of a bad lot (but also is judgemental).
Old Grumpy. Your quotation is inaccurate (although still imparting much truth). Did you ever see "The Good Life" about a suburban couple trying subsistence life? Quite a few people in real life up sticks and go off to live off the land. Most don't last long before returning to the fleshpots, but some do adopt the bucolic lifestyle. Ayla gives hints she lives a similar life, but who can tell? (Fire and brimstone might be coming my way, she has been rather inactive lately).