"Asking Africa to forgo industrial development to minimise future carbon emissions is immoral", challenges economist James Shikwati. He defines that dream as ‘development through widespread access to reliable electricity powerful enough to (i) heat and power homes and (ii) power industrial plants like steel mills'.

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He points out that electricity is a key factor in both wealth and health. Not only do hospitals need more electricity than can be provided by a roof of solar panels, a major cause of premature death and illness in Africa is the smoke from wood and coal fires used for heating and to cook food.

Indeed, according to the World Health Organisation, [1] around 50% of the Earth’s human population, almost all in the less industrially developed countries (LIDCs), relies on coal, wood, dung and crop residues for domestic energy. These materials are typically burnt in simple stoves with very incomplete combustion, exposing women and young children to high levels of indoor air pollution every day. There is consistent evidence that indoor air pollution increases the risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and of acute respiratory infections in childhood, the most important cause of death among children under five years of age in LIDCs.

Evidence also links indoor exposure to smoke with low birth weight, increased infant mortality, pulmonary tuberculosis, nasopharyngeal and laryngeal cancer and cataracts. Coal smoke, in particular, has been linked to lung cancer.

Overall, although there is an urgent need for more research into preventable death in LIDCs, it is likely that nearly two million excess deaths annually are caused by exposure to domestic smoke worldwide.

Ed.- If one agrees that asking LIDCs to forgo development is, not to mince words, immoral, the more industrially developed countries (MIDCs) have two choices:

• to reduce their own carbon dioxide emissions to a point where significantly increased emissions from LIDCs can be accommodated without tipping the Earth into unpredictable, perhaps negative, weather patterns, OR
• to use some of their wealth to remove the need for LIDCs to emit large amounts of global warming gases during their version of our 250 years of industrialisation.

One imagines:

• the building of hundreds of thousands of wind and solar energy farms with local and regional networks of underground electricity cables linking all cities, towns and villages, using local labour but all paid for by the MIDCs
• the building of thorium-fuelled nuclear power stations to drive heavy industry like steel mills and chemical plants read more