Please forgive me for digressing from the politics of this election year to a completely ridiculous political action not actually embedded in our election discourse.
When I heard that Hillary Clinton was in charge of giving $50 million to the UN, I was outraged. To give the UN any money for any purpose whatsoever is a big mistake. It all sounds very high-minded at the time, but we all know what happens to money that arrives in the UN. It sticks to the fingers of dictators and shysters around the world who spit in the eye of the USA and deprive their own people of any benefit from that money.
When I learned that the money was to be used for clean stoves, I was really mystified. Clean stoves? My stove could use a good cleaning, and it hadn’t occurred to me to simply replace it instead of cleaning it. Why would the UN get involved in that kind of an exchange?
Then I read that it was all about cookstoves which are actually wood fires built on a few stones under a shelter or outside. These stoves are alleged to cause disease from smoke inhalation, but worse, they cause climate change due to emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and black carbon. Wasn’t black carbon supposed to be the big cancer problem with grilled hamburgers a few years ago? and aren’t people still grilling hamburgers? This whole project sounds like a complete scam.
In 2004, my husband and I visited Papua New Guinea. During our three-week visit there, we observed the use of wood fires and stones to cook food which we ate. Some of the fires were, indeed, under a cooking shelter, where women stored their cookware and tools, just like any American cook would use a suburban kitchen. We sat in the shelters or near the fires and suffered no harmful consequences whatsoever from either the fires or the food. We know how this works. There is no emergency with cookstoves that requires the immediate injection of $50 million to replace these stoves around the world. It is a complete hoax.
Reid Detchon, vice president for energy and climate at the United Nations Foundation, said, with regard to this project, “You’re going to have to create a thriving cookstove industry that can supply both stoves and fuels that people want and need.” Here is the big problem. The stoves we saw were in use by people who really had no hard currency with which to buy either a stove or non-polluting fuel for it. They were not dissatisfied with their stoves, nor did they express any experience with ill health or bad weather associated with the stoves. (I dispute the whole allegation that a wood fire is polluting and some other kind of fuel is not. People have been using wood fires for a long time. It is hard to believe that after millions of years they have suddenly become a threat.) These people are healthier than most of the people I know who live in “civilization.” Show me one person in downtown Baltimore who could walk five miles barefoot over rocks and uphill with three watermelons in a bag hung from his/her forehead.
This article demonstrates yet one more evidence that we need to disengage from funding the UN. We have already given the UN more money than any other country. If they want $50 million for something, let them pull it out of our annual contribution to support the UN’s many delightful initiatives. Oh, maybe that wouldn’t work, since it is likely that all that money has already been siphoned off to decorate and delight dictators in Africa and South America. Hmmm.
The UN is not a good steward of the money it receives. The UN does not expect from any country what it feels it has the right to demand from the US. It is time for that whole charade to stop. We don’t need to support the replacement of cookstoves for people who do not want their cookstoves replaced and who do not have the means to pay for different cookstoves anyway. It is no help to people to give money to the UN, because the people never see any of that money. Let’s stop it now! Let’s stop the flow of bucks right here!
