Kenya shouldn’t waste time drafting climate change laws

Kenya loves a good bandwagon, and none more so than the Western ones. When such a bandwagon, hitched up to a well-funded gravy train, of course , trundles into town, Kenyans hop onto it with glee, eyeing up the opportunities for eating that almost always accompany such Western do-gooding fads.

The latest, super-fashionable Western fad to hit these shores is, of course, climate change. It has been around for a while, but it has slowly been evolving from what it was claimed to be, to what it is now said to be.

It first started out as “global warming”: an alleged increase in global temperatures that would, we were told rather forbiddingly, sink entire continents under the flood waters released as polar ice caps melted.

Former US Vice President Al Gore even flew around the world with a scary presentation titled “An Inconvenient Truth”, in which he painted apocalyptic scenarios of entire countries being swallowed up by meter-high oceans thanks to global warming.

We were beginning to get convinced, especially since the remedies recommended were common sense: planting trees, mainly. Kenyans have been planting trees ever since we could walk as a nation.

Planting trees is so ingrained in the Kenyan psyche that it is even used as a form of protest: when the late Professor Wangari Maathai wanted to protest one or other government action, she planted trees, and we cheered and planted trees too.

This was never going to be a problem for Kenyans we love trees, and other than our kleptocratic ruling class, who have taken to grabbing forest land and clearing it to build large housing estates, the average Kenyan loves and enjoys planting trees of all sorts everywhere.

Miniscule

But then something changed. Instead of the world getting hotter, it appeared to be getting colder. Over the last decade, each northern and southern hemisphere winter has been colder than the one before it. Arctic and Antarctic ice has been growing, not shrinking.

In 2012, Antarctic sea ice was at its greatest extent since satellites first began measuring in 35 years ago. It was the same case in the Arctic, and Western global-warming campaigners rushed to find new explanations.

They, incredibly, told us the world was experiencing more ice because the world is warming up – and they then stopped calling it global warming, changing instead to climate change.

Villagers familiar with voodoo science would have ignored the issue at that point, except that it is now at our doorsteps. Kenya’s government wants to craft a law on climate change and throw money at it for whatever reason.

To put this into perspective: even if climate change was 100% confirmed, which it isn’t, Africa’s contribution to global emissions , the bad gases like carbon dioxide that apparently trap heat in the atmosphere and will one day roast us all,  is so miniscule that we are barely contributing 1% of world emissions.

All of Africa’s, and Kenya’s, emissions are below the limits that climate scientists recommend for a sustainable planet.

The bad boys, we are told, are America and China and India and Europe, who are all belching up noxious gases on behalf of everyone else.

Let’s not waste time and energy on pointless laws: let’s focus on planting trees, conserving our wildlife, locking up corrupt politicians and killing poachers instead.