Started Dirty but Cleaned Up Our Act: The "Greens" Great Betrayal

We, the so-called clean and civilized nations, love to parade our polished streets, advanced industries, and modern comforts. But here’s the truth no one likes to talk about: our prosperity was born in filth. Coal, oil, and gas-powered the Industrial Revolution, lighting up cities, fueling factories, and dragging millions out of poverty. Sure, we poisoned rivers, darkened skies, and drove species to extinction, but we emerged as economic giants—cleaner, richer, and better equipped to tackle environmental challenges.

Now, instead of sharing that path to progress, we stand on our moral high ground, wagging fingers at the world’s poor. We demand they skip the very steps that made us strong. Fossil fuels? Out of the question. Instead, they’re told to embrace unreliable green solutions that barely keep the lights on, let alone power industries and economic growth.

16% of the world’s population is stuck in the dark—literally. Heathrow Airport consumes more energy than the entire country of Sierra Leone. In sub-Saharan Africa, 600 million people live without electricity, and two-thirds of schools have no power. Families cook on open fires or kerosene stoves, choking on toxic fumes that kill 3.2 million people annually. Children die from preventable diseases because hospitals can’t refrigerate vaccines. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization estimates that only 10% of healthcare facilities in the poorest states have a reliable electricity supply. For instance, in Uganda, over 70% of healthcare facilities don't have adequate access to main power.

Yet, we preach wind and solar—technologies that work part-time, at best. We’re not just failing to help; we’re actively betraying these nations by imposing energy policies that prioritize our green fantasies over their survival. The G20’s $3 trillion demand for developing nations—with $1.8 trillion earmarked for “sustainable infrastructure” but only $1.2 trillion for food, health, and education—reveals everything. We’ve quadrupled green energy spending since 2019, yet poverty and hunger remain untouched.

Fossil fuels have been powering and expanding economies for over 150 years, and currently supply about 80 percent of the world’s energy. But, we push developing nations toward renewables, knowing full well that these technologies are utterly unfit for their economic and industrial needs and are extremely slow in replacement of fossil fuels. No amount of solar panels or windmills will power heavy machinery, steel or any other production. It’s not about saving the planet; it’s about control.

Developing nations know better. China added more coal capacity last year than it did from wind and solar combined–equivalent to two coal power plants a week. India produced about six times more energy from coal than from renewables. Bangladesh relied on fossil fuels for 98% of its electricity in 2023, while Indonesia’s coal output was 90 times higher. These nations aren’t clinging to coal for nostalgia; they’re doing what works. Reliable energy is the foundation of economic growth.

We’re told that wind and solar are the cheapest energy sources. That’s a lie. They’re only “cheap” when the sun shines or the wind blows. Add in storage, backup systems, and grid upgrades, and the cost skyrockets suggesting an 11-42 times increase, and they become uncompetitive to fossil fuels, argues Bjorn Lomborg. Making it the most expensive energy source on the planet. Therefore, this research?shows that for every six units of green energy, less than one unit displaces fossil-fuel energy–they are not only making it unreliable and expensive but also do not serve the purpose they promised to reach.

When these panels and turbines reach the end of their short lives, they pile up in landfills, leaching toxins like 4.7 kilograms of lead per panel. In Africa, solar waste is dumped in poor communities, poisoning children’s blood and killing their futures.

The cases of lead poisoning linked to e-waste and green energy components are spread across various regions, primarily in Africa, where improper waste disposal practices are common:

1. Nigeria: In Nigeria’s Zamfara region, the worst lead poisoning outbreak in 2012 claimed the lives of over 400 children, with thousands more left brain-damaged or disabled due to lead exposure from gold mining. Expressing similar effects from lead batteries recycling. Despite this tragedy, the Nigerian government has yet to implement effective measures to address lead contamination from mining activities.?

2. Dakar, Senegal: In Thiaroye-Sur-Mer, a suburb of Dakar, there was an incident of child deaths linked to informal lead-acid battery recycling. In March 2008, 18 children under the age of five died from acute lead poisoning due to constant exposure to lead dust in the air, soil, and water. The main economic activity in the town was informal recycling of used lead-acid car batteries, which exposed about 40,000 people to lead dust. Blood tests conducted in April 2008 on 41 children in Thiaroye-Sur-Mer showed that 100% of the children tested had levels over 10 μg/dL, with the highest average being 158 μg/dL for the one-to-five year age group

3. Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): A 2011 study from the University of Kinshasa found that over 40% of children in this city had dangerous levels of lead in their blood, a result of exposure to improperly managed lead waste.

4. Kabwe, Zambia: Known as one of the most polluted places on Earth, Kabwe has been severely affected by lead mining and smelting activities. A study found that over 95% of children living in the most affected townships had high blood lead levels (BLLs) > 10μg/dL. Approximately 50% of those children had BLLs ≥ 45μg/dL. A more recent study estimated the population-wide exposure, finding a mean BLL of 11.9 μg/dL (11.6–12.1, 95% CI) and that 74.9% of residents had BLLs above the standard reference level of 5 μg/dL.

5. Agbogbloshie, Ghana: This location is one of the largest e-waste dumping sites in West Africa. The study assessed 327 participants aged 12, meaning children to 68 years, with a median age of 23, primarily under 30. Alarmingly, 77.7% had pathological blood lead levels (BLL), with 14% exceeding 10.0 μg/dl and 5.9% surpassing the German occupational safety threshold of 15.0 μg/dl. Many exhibited symptoms of high lead exposure, including severe kidney disorders, as indicated by elevated creatinine levels in 254 participants.

Recycling is not an option either. Safe recycling of solar panels rarely happens, as it’s 30 times cheaper to discard them irresponsibly. Some estimations say that recycling costs around $20 to $30, whilst dumping renewables in the field sums up to $1 to $2 dollars.

One of the dirtiest secrets of the renewables industry is the exploitation of human lives, children, particularly in cobalt mining. Cobalt is a critical component in batteries for electric vehicles and renewable technologies. However, 70% of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where by some sources, 361,000 children worked in the copper and cobalt mines of Haut Katanga and Lualaba in 2024. These children inhale toxic dust and risk fatal collapses, earning meagre wages while multinational corporations profit. Amnesty International and other organizations have repeatedly raised alarms, labelling the industry as one built on modern-day slavery.

Lithium mining, essential for battery production, comes with its environmental price. Lithium brine lakes, mainly found in South America’s lithium triangle (Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile), are devastating ecosystems. Extracting just one tonne of lithium requires 500,000 gallons of water, depleting local water supplies and leaving land infertile. Farmers in Chile’s Salar de Atacama, a key lithium mining region, report that 65% of the region’s water supply is consumed by mining activities, severely affecting agriculture and biodiversity.

There is a solution—one that the green lobby hates to admit: nuclear energy. A single nuclear plant like Barakkah in UAE, occupying just six square kilometres can produce as much energy as New Zealand uses in a year. Nuclear power is?4.5 times more efficient than renewable energy?and twice as energy-dense as fossil fuels. It runs 24/7, unaffected by weather or time of day. To match the output of Barakah with solar, you would need over ???? ?????????????? ?????????? ???????????? spread across ?????? ?????? of land. Wind? Even worse. It would take ??,?????? ???????? ???????????????? and a staggering ??,?????? ?????? of land to produce the same energy. The Barakah plant only takes up ?? ?????? of land. That’s ??.??% of the space solar would require, and just ??.????% of what wind farms would need. (Calculations are my own, regard this post to see the equations)

In Asia, nuclear power is already proving its worth. The PeLUIt-40 reactor achieves electricity costs between 11 and 37.82 cents per kWh, far cheaper than diesel plants, which exceed 39.86 cents per kWh. If we prioritize nuclear, we can lift billions out of energy poverty, boost economies, and give developing nations the tools to succeed—without the greenwashing.

Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo formed it the best at Africa Energy Week 2023,

"Where is the justice when you used what (fossil fuels) was available to you, but we (Africans) can’t use it? You want to keep us in the habitual position of underdevelopment. We reject that!"

This hypocrisy is killing the world’s poor. Instead of lifting them out of hardship, we shackle them with green energy mandates that don’t work. We waste trillions on green experiments while a billion people go hungry and around five million children die annually before their fifth birthday–1 death every 6 seconds.

The truth is, the richest and cleanest nations aren’t the ones that started green; they’re the ones that started dirty and cleaned up their act. Fossil fuels powered progress and nuclear can now take us further. But first, we must abandon the hypocritical green agenda that prioritizes virtue signalling over real solutions. If we fail, we’ll not only betray the world’s poor—we’ll condemn them to a future of darkness and despair.