Watch your wallet: examples of heavy polluters saying “we need to bring energy to the world’s poorest” so they can pollute and profit more.

December 14, 2022 by Joshua
in Blog

Read my post When a heavy polluter says “we need to bring energy to the world’s poorest,” watch your wallet, where I describe that everyone with their misguided way to drive our polluting system faster profiting themselves in the process says some version of “we’re helping the poor,” they’re helping themselves, likely exacerbating poverty, dumping pollution onto the poor.


As I find examples in the media, I’ll put them here:

February 16, 2021, Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need: “Eventually it sank in. The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases. Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.”

December 12, 2022, Financial Times: US scientists boost clean power hopes with fusion energy breakthrough: “At the launch of a new White House fusion power strategy this year, Congressman Don Beyer, chair of the bipartisan fusion energy caucus, described the technology as the “holy grail” of clean energy, adding: ‘Fusion has the potential to lift more citizens of the world out of poverty than anything since the invention of fire.'” Fusion is not clean, green, or renewable. Not emitting carbon dioxide doesn’t mean clean. It would augment every other problem by accelerating the system causing deforestation, extinctions, pollution, aquifer depletion, and so on.

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