Gender Equality as a Development Goal

The rich world’s fossil fuel hypocrisy is on full display in its response to the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While the wealthy G7 countries admonish the world’s poor to use only renewables because of climate concerns, Europe and the United States are going begging to Arab nations to expand oil production, Germany is reopening coal power plants and Spain and Italy are ramping up African gas production. So many European countries have asked Botswana to mine more coal it will have to triple its exports.

Prioritizing spending alternatives is difficult in every country. But it is especially challenging in Haiti, where, following years of fractious politics, a newly elected government is striving to expand the economy and improve wellbeing while confronting the lingering consequences of the massive 2010 earthquake.

Promoting his climate change film An Inconvenient Sequel, former US vice-president Al Gore likes to say that the nightly news has become “a nature hike through the Book of Revelations”.

He’s not the only one touting an apocalypse. In a much-shared story, New York magazine warned that famine, economic collapse and “a sun that cooks us” will happen as soon as the end of this century, as “parts of the Earth will likely become uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable”.