President Obama’s trip to Africa revealed how despicable his “green” agenda, couched in the excuse of “climate change,” truly is.
It’s one thing to hamstring the U.S. economy – one of the strongest and resilient in the world – with the ridiculous, self-inflicted insistence that we not use all the energy resources at our disposal, all to save us from the phantom crisis of global warming. While temperatures haven’t risen for 15 years and there’s actually been cooling since 2002, the president and his alarmist minions have designed failed scheme after failed scheme in the name of solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
But now Obama is bringing his “green” folly to the Third World. During his Africa travels he shared widely his naïve outlook, and his ignorant analysis of energy’s crucial function within it, to people groups who could greatly improve their condition with cheap and clean electricity and transportation fuels. But rather than bring economic hope that comes with accessible, affordable power, like the Western countries have, instead President Obama promised Africans money and policies that have brought us an endless barrage of taxpayer subsidies for energy that doesn’t work.
In a speech at the University of Cape Town the president announced a $7 billion investment, as part of a public-private partnership, in the expansion of access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa.
“I’m calling for America to up our game when it comes to Africa,” he said. “There’s no question Africa’s on the move, but it’s not moving fast enough for the child still languishing in poverty in forgotten townships.”
According to Bloomberg, the initiative will “add more than 10,000 megawatts of cleaner, more efficient electric generation capacity and to expand electricity access to at least 20 million new households and commercial entities, according to the White House.” Certainly some good will be done – albeit with money extracted from taxpayers rather than given voluntarily – but don’t believe the numbers. The Obama administration is the master of exaggeration and even outright falsehoods.
But the truth is revealed in the president’s attitude about energy and his indifference to the world’s real needs, which was revealed in his remarks at the University of Johannesburg-Soweto. Rather than promise the real hope of development of practical, affordable energy-generating technologies (which are plenty clean) – like those that use coal, natural gas and nuclear – Obama instead sounded like he was ready to send the next batch of wind turbines and solar panels, all which are virtually useless and depend on an endless supply of government subsidies.
“Ultimately,” the president said, “if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over — unless we find new ways of producing energy.”
To set ourselves on such a course would wreak havoc in Obama’s alternative world. Unfortunately back here in reality, millions more African children will die in an impoverished but less carbon dioxide-inflicted environment, rather than have a few more particulates in the air and be able to save millions of more lives thanks to more widespread, functional electricity.
Paul Chesser is an associate fellow for the National Legal and Policy Center and publishes CarolinaPlottHound.com, an aggregator of North Carolina news.