The Climate Crisis

The Good News in the Bad News

Just in case you thought the Climate Crisis prospects couldn't get worse, there's this:

A report to be released Monday by Christian Aid said 162 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone could die of disease directly attributable to global warming by the end of the century.

That's isnt deaths from water depletion, famine, pollution or warfare over resources (that would add perhaps 30 million more), but just from diseases as the subcontinent gets hotter and drier. But there's another part of the report:

If sub-Saharan Africa switched from fossil fuels to other sources of energy, including solar, wind and water, the environment would benefit and there would be more jobs, better health and enhanced opportunities for learning, the report said.

It estimated that every household in Africa could change to clean, renewable energy sources for less money than it would take to pay the region's oil bill for the next decade. Developing technology could even transform the world's most impoverished continent into a net exporter of clean energy, the report said.

The alternatives are suicidal, more starkly obvious there perhaps than in the rest of the world where dependence on non-renewable energy, not to mention burning carbon and destroying the forests that are literally the lungs of our planet, promise the same self-destruction.

But the opportunities are also clearer, and in some ways more durable. Where else in the world would solar energy be more accessible and useful? The BBC account of the report quotes: The author of the report, John McGhie, said that for $50bn (£26bn) the whole of sub-Saharan Africa could be turned into a solar-generated economy. "And $50bn is exactly the same amount as actually the continent would have to pay on extra fuel bills from oil," he said.

Renewable, sustainable, decentralized energy is the future, if there is going to be one. Africa should give itself, and humankind, a fighting chance, and the industralized nations must help. Using solar can ease pressure on the last of the African landscape, where many endangered species are periliously close to extinction. Our DNA tells science that this is the place we all came from. It may be the place where we begin to renew ourselves and our planet.