The Hypocrisy of Fossil-Fuel Divestment

You can’t really take fossil fuel divestment seriously unless you ignore a lot of inconvenient truths. These would include such things as Al Gore’s carbon footprint or the fuel bill for the dozens of private jets flown to any UN climate summit. On a more mundane level, we might point to benefits of abundant and affordable resources of coal, natural gas and crude oil that power modern industrialized economies and will continue to dominate as future energy sources. Alas, according to the World Bank, around 730 million people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on solid biomass for cooking, which – when used indoors with inefficient cookstoves – causes air pollution that results in nearly 600,000 premature deaths in Africa each year. The fossil fuel divestment movement hasn’t really taken off in Africa, for some reason.