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Re:Earth likely briefly passed critical warming threshold on... by ben_w on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:33AM (#38361439)
Africa can skip a lot of our mistakes.

PV is cheap, and for places that don't yet have a reliable grid connection, batteries may be cheaper than building a grid (or stabilising it if they have one that's unstable).

Re:Earth likely briefly passed critical warming threshold on... by hutzlibu on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @04:57AM (#38361610)
Yup, the same way they skipped landline phones and started with smartphones right away.
Re:Earth likely briefly passed critical warming threshold on... by FirmwareBurner on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:57AM (#38362449)
They probably won't skip ICE car ownership and dirty industry revolving around mining and manufacturing cheap stuff for the 'green' west.
Re:Earth likely briefly passed critical warming threshold on... by hutzlibu on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @07:06AM (#38362538)
No, currently they don't. All the old cars not fit for europe anymore, just get send to africa.

But if the west would be serious about climate change and developement aid, there would be huge opportunities to do things different.

Re:Earth likely briefly passed critical warming threshold on... by ben_w on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @10:03AM (#38364543)
I've only visited one place in Africa (Nairobi) an only once (about a decade ago); the cars I saw were all in poor condition and about 20-30 years old when I saw them.

Also one of the people we visited had an income so low their annual rent was equivalent to about US$1k, so consider how old and decrepit a vehicle has to be on a western market to be in her price range.

There's a huge variation of culture and living standards across the continent, from people much richer than that who buy new cars that are expensive by western standards to people who walk miles to get water from a well because there isn't any plumbing.

PV and storage have the advantage of being scalable down to small cheap things that even the poorest can benefit from. Cars, not so much, so for low priced transportation, think instead about e-bicycles and e-motorbikes, and even manual bicycles. Or public transport (but even then, the crowded matatu I was in for one trip looked old).