The enviros may be doing everything in their power to limit the use of energy in the USA but fortunately, other nations are not jumping on this bandwagon. From South Africa's Daily Maverick:
Op-Ed: Clean Coal is the way to power Africa – and SA academics know how
Professor Rosemary Falcon heads the Sustainable Coal Research Group at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, where the late Nelson Mandela studied law in the 1950s.
Falcon leads a team of nine academics along with 20 Mastersand doctoral students who, with their own laboratory at Wits, say they have proved conclusively that clean coal is not only possible, but among the cheapest ways to generate electricity on a continent where more than 600 million Africans live without power.
“It starts by understanding that coal varies enormously,” she said.
“Each region has a different recipe of minerals and fossil matter, and if you give me a lump of coal out of Kenya, the US, Europe, India or Colombia, I can probably tell you where it’s from.”
A bit more - Bada is another member of the team - Dr Samson Bada of Nigeria:
The use of coal to generate electricity in Africa is at a record high, with new plants under way in Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa. Bada has little time for those who condemn this.
“I am tired of being lectured by people in rich countries who have never lived a day without electricity,” he said.
“Maybe they should just go home and turn off their fridge, geyser, their laptops and lights. Then live like that for a month and tell us, who have suffered for years, not to burn coal.”
Emphasis mine - exactly. The enviro-Marxists want to bring power to the people, just not enough to do useful work or to require a generating plant. A bit more - this from Dr Jacob Masiala from the Democratic Republic of Congo:
“Aid groups come to Africa and give out solar lamps the size of a pumpkin,” he said.
“But no one in London or Los Angeles would be willing to make do with that. Don’t tell me that China, Russia and the West should have electricity and black people in Mali or Mozambique should live in huts with light from a solar toy. We need power for cities, factories, mines and to run schools and hospitals.”
Back to Dr. Bada again:
Bada said he was a fan of wind and solar, but the technology was not yet there to industrialise a continent.
“Solar doesn’t work at night, and turbines stand idle when the wind doesn’t blow,” he said.
“How do you run an operating theatre with that? How do you power a city, a school, the lift in a gold mine taking workers more than two miles underground? There has to be a baseload power supply and this can be complemented with solar. The industrial revolution and the growth of China and India has all been powered by coal. The good news is we can now burn it cleanly.”
So true - we have over 500 years of known coal deposits in the USA alone. Why should we hamstring our development just to satisfy some half-baked ideas about our climate. Especially when these are founded on very bad science.
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