What about the fat yanks

Myron Ebell performs his usual service of highlighting instances of bad journalism whenever he praises something as an excellent, I beg your pardon, shite article.

Myron writes:

The Washington Post has discovered that poor people in poor countries need access to modern energy. In an excellent article on today’s front page, Emily Wax details the energy poverty of Africa, India, and Pakistan. And she draws the obvious conclusion that has evaded most of the establishment media for years: that’s why India and other developing countries aren’t going to sign on to any UN treaty that mandates reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions. They don’t need an energy diet; they need thousands of coal-fired power plants....

Of course, environmental pressure groups say that poor countries need to avoid “our mistakes” and build a new energy economy using renewable sources and new technologies. The problem is that most of these new sources provide a lot more sanctimonious self-satisfaction than energy. I recently drove through upstate New York on a mild summer day. I saw over seventy windmills in several groups along the way. Not a single one was turning. That’s because the wind doesn’t blow much in the summer (when demand is highest because of air conditioning). In sub-tropical countries like India there isn’t much wind at any time of year.

But there is a lot of sun you blithering block-head.

The WaPo article, even with its death-making Myron Ebell narrative, cannot be entirely cleansed of climate change consequences:

In New Delhi this summer, thousands of men, some wearing only underwear in protest, rioted over power cuts. The problem was exacerbated this year by a drought across Asia and Africa, which has caused rivers to slow to a trickle and mountain glaciers to shrink.

The incident, from last summer, is reported here.

The mountain glaciers are a different story. As they disappear, large areas of the global south will become uninhabitable for humans due to water shortages and rising sea levels. A least a billion people will very rapidly be without land or food.

This is going to be somewhat more stark for people than not getting their electricity 24 hours a day.

The fact is, Myron Ebell doesn't care if half the world's population dies in agony and destitution. Just so long as their governments buy more coal first.

How this story relates to America's massive over-consumption of power at the moment defies reason. The CEI has been working on this line for at least a year, trying to explain that if you reduce power use in America, then impoverished children in Africa will never have electricity.

This is the CEI video (initially banned) from April 2008:



What a load of bollocks.

Here's what Myron Ebell and a lot of our dead-to-the-world political policy-makers actually think: