A Dude Named Lumumba Said It
December 11th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Sudanese G77-chair Lumumba Di-Aping told IPS:
Africa demands up to five percent of the GDP of industrialised nations every year, because of their historical debt and the continuation of causing the harm…We are talking roughly about two trillion US dollars annually till 2050 for adaptation, mitigation and technology transfer. We do not believe this is a big amount of money as the U.S. spent 22 trillion on saving Wall Street.
A tithe would be better, but Africa deserves 5 percent of the industrialized countries’ GDP. More. The other 5 percent should go to Latin America and South Asia. But the tithing is going the other way. Sub-Saharan Africa spends 15 billion dollars a year on debt service. Most of the debt is “odious,” hence, illegitimately incurred. Africa has no responsibility to pay it. 15 billion dollars a year is the amount sub-Saharan Africa pays on its ~227 billion dollar extant foreign debt, 70 percent of Africa’s over-all debt. That’s monetary. Africa’s ecology will pay, too. Its agriculture will be devastated by a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees. A global average temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius means African temperatures rise 3 degrees Celsius. Many African countries close to the equatorial belt will see their grain production essentially destroyed–African corn and wheat production is already close to its survival thresholds at current global temperatures. In Mali, Niger, the Sudan, and much of the Horn of Africa—West Africa, too—arid and semi-arid agriculture will likely be wiped out. Somalia and Sudan are already wracked with climate wars.
So what Africa is demanding are reparations. Not for the slave trade, but for ravaging the commons. As Bolivia’s climate negotiator put it, “Twenty percent of the population have actually emitted more than two-thirds of the emissions, and as a result, they have caused more than 90 percent of the increase in temperatures.” If you’re responsible, you’re culpable. Right? Barack Obama sent a special envoy to Copenhagen to convey the US outlook: we “categorically reject [any] sense of guilt or culpability or reparations.” Obama is an African name, Kenyan. Kenya will lose 3 percent of its 35 billion dollar GDP by 2030 due to climate change. Kenya’s not atypical. That’s why Africa and most of the G-77 is demanding a hard cap on warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and a reduction in global atmospheric CO2 concentrations from the current 387ppm to 350 ppm.
No one will listen. Not yet. Why? Capitalism. As Lord Nicholas Stern has said, “it is difficult to secure emission cuts faster than about 1 per cent a year except in instances of recession.” 350ppm is incompatible with growth. Here’s another African name: Lumumba. When asked what would happen if (when) no one listens to African demands for a 40 to 45 percent cut in CO2 emissions from developed countries, relative to 1990 levels, Lumumba said, “It’s very simple… then we know why we are dying.” It would not be the first time that colonialism leads to holocaust. Then, the “impact of the drought on the agricultural society of the time was immense. So far as is known, the famine that ravished the region is the worst ever to afflict the human species.” Redux.
The fact that the developed nations will never finance the demands made by the developing world for technology transfer and mitigation should be viewed as another proof that the entire AGW theme is indeed a scam as any objective scientific analysis quickly shows.
No, it’s not about big government or tax hikes, it’s bigger than that. A wealth of material on the subject is posted at my site including my just written article on Carbonphobia, the real environmental threat.
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/carbonphobia-the-real-environmental-threat/