‘Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over — unless we find new ways of producing energy.”
President Obama delivered this warning in Johannesburg at the start of his just-ended visit to Africa. It was a discordant side note in a trip designed to highlight the president’s faith in a “new Africa” that is “more confident, more prosperous and taking its place on the world stage.” We say discordant because instead of looking at the progress Africa’s poor have made as something to celebrate, the warning sees their newfound prosperity as a problem to be solved.
Put aside for a moment the scientific dispute over global warming, which the president declared an “existential challenge.” The idea that we ought to be worried because an African can now afford air conditioning seems to us to get priorities backward.
We suspect most Africans who can now earn enough to buy an air conditioner think of this as a big step up in their lives. And there was a day when we would have regarded a world in which the people of Africa finally can enjoy the same things we in the West take for granted — a car, a comfortable house, air conditioning — as what we were hoping for.
But that has changed. These days, when the world’s poor get rich, the world’s rich too often see in it the auguries of doom. Maybe it’s because you have to be rich already to have the luxury to worry about someone else getting a car or a big house.
It’s not just Africa. We saw this same attitude during China’s development. By any measure, the Chinese people today eat better and live better than they ever have in their history because its Communist government opened the nation to markets and trade. Yet instead of celebrating, we hear complaints about the stress this puts on world grain production.
We’re not saying that development is challenge-free. We are saying that when people lift themselves out of poverty, the world ought to cheer. And have enough confidence that Africa’s real resources — the talents and energies of its people — will be more than enough to tackle any challenges that come with its new wealth.