Saturday, November 13, 2021
At COP 26, Scant Mention Of Those Dying From Extreme Energy Poverty
By Robert Bryce
Forbes Energy
About 115 people were burned alive after a fuel tanker caught fire in Sierra Leone.
The defining inequality in the world today is the staggering disparity between the energy rich and the energy poor. That disparity came into gruesome focus yet again last week in Sierra Leone.
On November 5, while several thousand policymakers, researchers, and climate activists at the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow were trying to forge agreements on how to slash consumption of hydrocarbons, about 115 people were burned alive while trying to collect gasoline from a damaged fuel tanker truck near Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown.
According to the Washington Post, “People had crowded around the crash to collect leaking fuel when the tanker blew up, witnesses said. Anything spilled was viewed as wasteful in a community where many struggled to afford gas.” One witness described the scene, “dead bodies all around...There are people screaming, people burning alive.”
One witness said, “The firefighters came, but there was nothing they could do...The blaze was so much. There was nothing they could do to contain the inferno.”
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