Boulder’s climate virtue signaling keeps the wood fires burning
By Jon Caldara
The Colorado Supreme Court is allowing my hometown of Boulder to sue oil-and-gas companies over their culpability in climate change. It’s about time. I wish Boulder nothing but success.
It is my hope Boulder takes these energy corporations to task and forces them to dramatically cut the emissions being flung into our air, choking our mother planet to death.
And there’s only one real way for those corporations to do it. They must produce a whole lot more natural gas. And fast.
Of the roughly 8 billion people inhabiting this beautiful planet, only 1 billion of us have reliable energy on demand. We Boulderites are among the fortunate one in eight who flip a light switch without worrying if the light will turn on. Helps make us fat and happy.
Boulder’s energy abundance privilege
Living the life of energy abundance makes it easy to think everyone else does, too. And when you live the self-important lifestyle that is Boulder, it’s easy to forget your policies have real-world trade-offs.
The energy you can afford to turn your nose up to in Boulder is an environmental miracle elsewhere.
According to Anne Hyre of The Bettering Lives Foundation, 2.1 billion people across the planet still cook over open wood fires.
Her goal is to help people in Ghana and Kenya (to start) move from cooking over open fires to using propane. Propane is a liquefied natural gas, LNG, the stuff made by the companies Boulder is suing.
To cook over an open fire fueled by wood, women in these African nations spend, on average, five hours a day collecting sticks, breaking them up by hand, setting them ablaze inside their poorly ventilated homes as their little children inhale the smoke, just to cook the family’s meals.
Indoor smoke pollution from open fire cooking kills an estimated 3 million people annually. That’s more than malaria, HIV, tuberculosis and cholera combined. But, fortunately, we Boulderites don’t have to watch those deaths, so what the hell do we care?
We care about the air we breathe and the wildfires within our expensive county borders. These fires are certainly not caused by mismanaged government forests and open space. They must be caused by global warming.
Global warming is caused by evil energy companies not doing enough to replace deadly wood fires with clean-burning gas stoves.
For around $40, women in poor nations (yep, men don’t gather wood or cook in these nothing-like-Boulder nations) could switch to a portable propane burner running on a portable tank, like what your backyard barbecue uses. When they do, their lives change dramatically for the better. But again, who cares about them.
Actually saving the planet
Why should it matter to we Boulderites? If these 2.1 billion people switched from cooking over burning twigs and cow dung to inexpensive propane stoves, it could save the planet.
According to the International Energy Agency, it would do more than ending shipping and airline transportation combined.
Do you hear that? Boulder wants to cut emissions drastically. That could be accomplished by moving people from cooking over open fires to gas. It would do more than ending shipping transportation and airline travel combined!
Environmentalist pin-up girl Greta Thunberg shames people for traveling by air. But the Earth doesn’t care if greenhouse gases are produced by wealthy Boulderites flying on vacations or people in squalor cooking over burning cow dung.
If the goal is cutting emissions, then stop deforestation, stop enslaving girls to peasant labor, stop killing children with indoor air pollution and start producing more LNG and get it to poor people around the globe.
Don’t keep it in the ground. Get it out of the ground to save the planet.
Burning wood pollutes less than burning cow dung. Burning coal or charcoal pollutes less than wood. And burning natural gas pollutes far less than coal.
Boulder-type environmentalists don’t want to talk about trade-offs. They want to emote.
It might come as a shock to we Boulderites, but those cooking over open wood fires will not soon be affording windmills, solar panels and backup batteries to simply cook their food. But a switch to affordable gas stoves in poor nations could be done relatively quickly.
It begs a question: Does Boulder care more about virtue signaling than solving climate change and saving lives?
