Let’s heed the UN’s dire warning and stop the east African oil pipeline now
If there is one world leader trying to look out for the planet as a whole, not just their own nation, it’s the UN secretary general. Last week, António
Guterres was resolute in the wake of the damning report from the IPCC on the perilious climate crisis. It should, he said, sound “a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet”.
He called for an end to “all new fossil fuel exploration and production”, and told countries to shift fossil fuel subsidies into renewable energy.
One of the first tests of whether anyone is paying attention will be if somebody rips up the plans for what would be the world’s longest heated crude oil pipeline – the 1,443km (900mile) east African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) that will run from oilfields in Uganda to the ocean ports of Tanzania. If it gets built, it’s is a sure sign that the world’s leaders are not listening.
The Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide-USA (ELAW-USA) estimates that burning the 210,000 barrels of oil a day that will be transported by the pipeline will produce more than 34m metric tonnes of carbon annually. This is significantly greater than the current combined emissions of Uganda and Tanzania.
So far, the Chinese national oil company, French oil giant Total, and the governments of Uganda and Tanzania are pressing ahead, apparently putting the money that can be made ahead of the interests of the climate.
Even on purely economic terms, it’s a terrible bargain. In 2015, the Ugandan government estimated that climate crisis damages will collectively amount to 2-4% of the country’s gross domestic product between 2010 and 2050.
This is about $3.2 to $5.9bn annually, losses that will exponentially rise if crude oil extraction, export and use is encouraged. The climate crisis is costing lives and livelihoods in Uganda now, with flash floods and landslides taking lives and destroying public infrastructure such as roads and farmlands. Currently, communities that lived near Lake Albert have been displaced due to increased water levels. Sealed oilwells near Lake Albert were also submerged last year.
You can see the same kind of damage across the African continent: in 2019, for instance, cyclones Idai and Kenneth in southern Africa took the lives of more than 1,000 people. Millions more were left without food or basic services. Severe droughts in east Africa in 2011, 2017 and 2019 destroyed crops and livestock, leaving 15 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia with food and water shortages.
Yet whenever oil discoveries are made in Africa, governments move in haste to extract it without thinking of how people and broader economies will be affected. Little is done to analyse and publicly share information on how much revenue will be generated from the exploitation of fossil fuels vis-a-vis the economic and social costs of biodiversity loss, climate impacts, physical and economic displacement, and risks to livelihoods.
Other fears about the pipeline are well documented: physical and economic displacement; a delayed compensation process; threats to lives and livelihoods from oil spills; destruction of sites of spiritual value. More than 2,000 sq km of protected wildlife habitat faces significant disturbance. The governments and companies involved won’t even disclose key documents to the public to allow meaningful participation and informed consent. Not surprisingly, more than 1 million people have signed a global petition calling for the project to be axed.
But those numbers have to grow. The climate crisis is, in some ways, a crisis of inertia. We hear reports like last week’s dramatic missive from the IPCC, and for a few hours, maybe a few days, we’re shocked. But the oil companies count on our attention fading – because they’re focused on one thing: drilling for more.
In a world where the temperature is rising fast (and where solar power is now the cheapest source of energy), that makes no sense. The UN secretary general is right: either there’s a death knell for the fossil fuel industry or there’s a death knell for our civilisations, beginning, of course, with its poorest and most vulnerable people.
The IPCC report was full of deeply detailed computer models and highlevel physics, but its bottom line was easy to understand: when you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging. If ground is broken as planned next April on this pipeline, the failure will be all of ours.
of the boys harassing, sexually assaulting and raping girls in UK schools have been influenced by incel ideology and other forms of misogynistic extremism.
Incels may not be an organised group, but their online influence is far more widespread than we might like to think. If those at the most extreme end of the spectrum of radicalisation are carrying out massacres, it is not unrealistic to raise the concern that others may be carrying out smaller acts of violence and misogyny in their daily lives. “I enjoy walking behind women in the parking garage after work,” wrote one incel, on a forum I was investigating. “The sheer terror gives me a massive erection.”
This is not just about how we respond when acts of mass violence occur. It is about whether we are prepared to continue to allow a movement dedicated to violent hatred to flourish in our society. As long as we fail to recognise it as a form of extremism, women and girl’s lives will continue to be affected. Perhaps in numbers far greater than we realise.
Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, a collection of more than 80,000 women’s daily experiences of gender inequality
itive and prohibitively expensive; the devaluation of technical schools and, in terms of salary and training, education as a profession; the expectation that under-staffed and strapped high schools act as social services; the close integration of athletics with academics, which can defuse focus.
Ripley’s book, and the film, do not attempt to make top-down or cultural arguments about these issues; both instead enlist “field agents” – American students hungry for a new, more challenging educational experience who can act as viewers’ eyes and ears on the ground in other educational models. “The students are there every single day for a lot of their waking hours,” said Droz Tragos. “They’re going to have some insight” on “what’s exciting to them, what’s useful to them, what makes sense now, and it’s not always going to be things that you can look up on your iPhone.”
The four in the film each grapple with culture shock, homesickness, expectations both thwarted and succeeded. Jaxon, from Wyoming, breezes by in a school that generally prizes athletics over academics (on in-season Fridays, enough students skip for competitions that the school is forced to shut down completely); he seeks a challenge in the Netherlands, but is so overwhelmed by his inability to keep up that he ends up leaving the program early. Simone, a 17-year-old striver from the Bronx, feels stifled and ignored in her American school; she seeks a community focused around academics in Seoul, South Korea, consistently the top PISA-test scorers in the world. Brittany, from Florida, is intrigued by the educational success but relatively lax attitude toward homework in Finland. And Sadie, who was home-schooled until high school, searches for a more hands-on educational approach in Switzerland.
Droz Tragos filmed sporadically in each country over the course of 2018 and 2019, and witnessed a “totally different” baseline from US schools in each. “It wasn’t that school was a babysitter, it wasn’t that people were afraid for their safety and that there were guns and metal detectors, it wasn’t that students were made to show hallway passes and get bathroom passes,” she said. “There’s a lot of stuff that we still do just as a weird baseline that was not a reality in any of these other places. And to see when that is lifted, what that looks like, is pretty powerful” both in the opportunities afforded to students and how disorienting other countries’ assumptions of competence and autonomy were for the Americans.
If there is one thing she could change immediately for US schools, she said, it would be that autonomy – for students to “be given some amount of freedom, to be given some amount of responsibility to come in and out of a classroom, to have lunch in a sunny park two blocks from your school”. Many US schools resemble a lockdown – students barred from using the bathroom without permission and a pass, no ability to leave the premises, punishment for attendance violations. Relative freedom of movement and scheduling is a “huge gift that changes somebody’s mentality,” said Droz Tragos, while feeling trapped “just takes all the inspiration, the curiosity, the sense of being capable” away from learning.
The Smartest Kids in the World does not offer a paean to other models; South Korea’s hagwons, extra-tutoring academies for a make-or-break test that stretch hours into the night, appear to stress Simone’s friends and make it more difficult for her to build relationships, for example. Nor does it reduce test outcomes to cultural stereotypes. The film instead observes, then summarizes, lessons from each model. South Korea demonstrates the power of valuing knowledge as a country’s most important resource, one to be cultivated and treasured; in the Netherlands, difficulty and the opportunity to fail provide opportunity for growth – with support, kids rise to the occasion. Switzerland’s vocational track, as rigorous and valued as its academic path to university, models the power of options. And Finland, where teaching schools are as difficult to get into as MIT, offers a vision in which instructor quality matters over quantity, and the autonomy afforded to students – freedom to leave campus whenever, little supervision – pays dividends in attendance and enthusiasm.
The throughline for each is trust in the students’ eagerness to not waste their time, and to be the arbiter of their own educational experience. “You can get lost in policy,” said Droz Tragos, “but if you bring it down to: what does it feel like on that first day of school? What are these kids coming in with? Big hearts, big ideas, a lot of hopes and dreams.
“The hope is in their hope,” she added.
While the film can’t provide a complete blueprint for a new model, it does offer “a starting point to say, ‘OK, some people around the world have figured out some things that we could be inspired by,’” said Droz Tragos, “‘and let’s at least commit to coming back to the table and including students at that table when we figure out what we could do differently.’”
The Smartest Kids in the World is streaming on discovery+ from 19 August with a UK date to be announced
fusal to give up what they have gained for themselves.
Fatima Ayub, an Afghan now working as Washington director of Crisis
Action, wrote on Twitter: “I know this for certain: if the Taliban insist on stripping joy from Afghans, the most widely traumatized and forsaken people on Earth, they will end their own rule.”