Choose Positive Living with Sara Troy and her guest Professor Caleb Rossiter, on air from November 24th
A new study shows how American clean coal technology can increase access to electricity and cut deaths from indoor air pollution
The coalition of climate scientists and energy engineers calls on President Trump to “pardon” Africa by ending ban on U.S., World Bank support ENERGY ANALYST AVAILABLE: Dr. Caleb Stewart Rossiteris, the executive director of the CO2 Coalition of 50 climate scientists and energy economists. Arlington, VA. The CO2 Coalition of 60 climate scientists and energy engineers today released a White Paper showing how American “high energy – low emissions” power plants can save lives in Africa. Only a third of Africans have access to electricity, and the World Health Organization estimates that 439,000 Africans die every year because they have to cook in their homes with wood and dried animal dung. According to a top researcher for the WHO, “having an open fire in your kitchen is like burning 400 cigarettes an hour.”
New-tech American Coal-fired Electricity for Africa: Clean Air, Indoors and Out reports on a field visit and interviews at the “Ultra Super-Critical” John Turk coal-fired power plant that serves Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. The plant eliminates virtually all pollutants from its emissions.
The White Paper reviews ten challenges that the operation of such a plant would face in the African economic and political context, and calls on the U.S. government to support proposals by African governments to import the American technology. Under Obama-era policies that are based on computer models that project a future “climate crisis” from emissions of a non-polluting plant food, carbon dioxide, U.S. foreign aid agencies currently oppose coal-fired electrical generation in Africa.
As the White Paper shows, international energy agencies agree that Africa will continue to use its abundant, inexpensive coal for electricity for decades to come. Unless this American technology is exported, China will build the scores of new power plants without pollution controls.
CO2 Coalition chairman Patrick Moore welcomed the new paper and its proposals: “It is energy madness and carbon colonialism for the United States to block government financing and World Bank support for the very projects that African governments want, and can operate effectively. Access to electricity is a basic right, and the key to health and life expectancy in Africa. As the White Paper concludes, African lives matter, too.”
The principal researchers for the White Paper are the Honorable Kathleen Hartnett White, formerly Texas’ top pollution regulator as chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and Dr. Caleb Stewart Rossiter, formerly a professor of statistics for public policy at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Hartnett White is a Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a member of the CO2 Coalition. Rossiter is the executive director of the CO2 Coalition.
Hartnett White noted: “Electrical power is the central nervous system of a modern economy and modern life expectancy. Africa’s electricity deficit translates directly into its life-expectancy deficit of 15 years per person.” Rossiter added: “The scourge of indoor air pollution I’ve seen throughout Africa can be wiped out by universal electrification from coal-fired plants. With American ‘scrubbing’ technology, African governments can also fight another killer at the same time: outdoor air pollution. President Trump should pardon Africa before he leaves office by issuing an executive order reversing U.S. opposition to clean coal projects there.” BIO: Climate statistician Caleb Stewart Rossiter is the executive director of the CO2 Coalition of 50 climate scientists and energy economists. He is also the director of the American Exceptionalism Media Project, an anti-imperialist website. Dr. Rossiter has worked in Washington’s foreign policy and academic arenas since 1981. He was deputy director of the bipartisan congressional Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus and then counselor to the Democratic chair of a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee.
Rossiter earned his Ph.D. in policy analysis from Cornell University and his M.A. in mathematics from American University, where he was a professor in both the School of International Service and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He taught courses on Quantitative Analysis, U.S. Policy in Africa, Statistics, and Mathematical Modeling. He was also a statistics professor in South Africa at the University of the Western Cape.
Professor Rossiter was originally part of the “consensus” that industrial carbon dioxide causes climate catastrophe, but began to change his conclusions in the mid-2000’s while assessing his statistics students’ papers on the studies and models cited by proponents of the consensus. Since then he has written and lectured widely on the weakness and uncertainty of climate claims and models.
Rossiter’s policy advocacy focuses on the generation and transmission of electricity in Africa, where life expectancies are low, only a quarter of households have reliable electricity, and fossil fuels “scrubbed” of pollutants are a crucial source of energy. He is a “climate casualty:” this advocacy resulted in his firing in 2014 by a Washington think tank whose funders promote the climate catastrophe hypothesis.
TWITTER: @CO2Coalition,
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