Monday Class: Climate Change 1O1 with Atwine Mugisha

It’s the rainy season in Uganda now. I say so because you are not the only one reading this blog, you, my countrymate. In case you forgot, the last time you shared a link to this blog, it reached someone outside this country and that someone subscribed and is now a regular reader, perhaps more regular than you, given the feedback on each post. My readership abroad is seriously competing with my readership domestically. You guys should do better. What happened to Buy Uganda Build Uganda (BUBU)? Anyway, you were my first cut, and like it is said, that is always the deepest.

Let’s get back to the rainy season. Well, nowadays, the seasons have changed because human beings want to go and live in the sky either on another planet or in space! What’s not possible with technology, huh? Okay, if they don’t, then why don’t they seriously care about their natural habitat, our planet Earth? Global warming has seriously affected our environment and climate as we used to know it. For instance, while we may think the rains have started, they may shock us and not fall for three weeks straight only to come back with cats and dogs destroying bridges and moving the land, what we call landslides.

This issue is so important that this past week has seen social media under the traffic of EACOP. That is the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, the project headed by Total Energies for the exploitation of the oil in the Albertine Region of Uganda (the area in and around Lake Mwitanzige, now Albert) and its transport to the Tanga Port in Tanzania on the Indian Ocean, in arguably the longest crude oil combustion pipeline in the world ever, 1,444km! Thinking about it, had it gone through Kenya because it also has a coast, it would have been much shorter, but you see, the way I know Kenya, it couldn’t be part of such an environmentally hazardous project. You see, Kenya is way ahead of us, I mean look at her shots at democracy. Did you know that Kenya is one of the very few African countries with strict policies and laws against traditional charcoal production to protect our environment? It has problems, I know, but the Kenyans try, unlike we Ugandans. Oh, how I love Kenya!

The thing about climate change and global warming is that we don’t actually understand those terms even though we have sung them in school and are now rioting over the same. I was hurt when I saw ignorant young high school students joining the street demonstration against the European Union Parliament resolution against EACOP. They claimed that the EU should leave our sovereign Uganda alone, which is funny because I know very few actually independent states in Africa. If we must talk about independence, the most iconic example is the state of Russia. Damn! Isn’t that huge country independent? The students claimed that Uganda should be free to develop its natural resources and that we should not be deprived of our wealth. Well, what do they know about climate change?

At a very basic level, we understand weather and climate by the cycle of rainfall. That is what we are taught in primary and secondary school. It was what I knew as well until June this year when I participated in the 31^st Christof Heyns African (formerly All Africa) Human Rights Moot Court Competition organized by the Centre for Human Rights of the University of Pretoria and hosted by the British University in Egypt. I particularly mooted the climate change issue which concerned the heavy charcoal burning in the hypothetical state of Foyalan. That was when I delved into the literature on climate change and global warming and that is when I discovered that we are living on a time bomb if we don’t take action now.

Let me break it down for you. We all know that oxygen supports burning but carbon dioxide does not. We also know that we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. I hope we also know that plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. Now, burning fossil fuels, which are naturally formed from the remains of dead plants and animals, is the primary cause of climate change/global warming. Fossil fuels include coal and crude oil. These are heavily carbon-concentrated. And so, burning them, which we do on a very large scale because these are industries of their own, contributes to large emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere beyond that which the plants can breathe in normally.

The second cause of climate change/global warming is deforestation. Because plants take in carbon dioxide, they are natural traps of CO_2. We call them carbon sinks. They tend to draw all carbon-containing gases to themselves. These gases, primarily CO₂ are what we call greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap the radiation of the earth after it has been warmed by sunlight. So when there are huge quantities of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, a lot of heat radiated by the earth will not escape to outer space and so our planet will be covered by a heat layer, an increase of which increases the heat on earth, what we call global warming.

Now, this increased heat affects the climatic patterns of the earth and this causes very many weather problems such as more dangerous storms, earthquakes, landslides, and droughts, among others. The reason why we no longer have definite rain seasons in Uganda is because of global warming. Forget the need to exploit our wealth, we cannot exploit it to die afterwards. We should opt for sustainable development options. Uganda is a very rich and blessed country and we can do better if we only were strict on public funds management. Forget the arguments of compensation to the affected persons, however extravagant it may be, the main issue here is how much CO₂ shall we be emitting and whether it is proportionate or not.

34 million tons of carbon dioxide each year! Think about it, pray about it, look to your conscience, and then we can talk about it again.    

Now that was Climate Change 1O1 with Atwine Mugisha. Yet, that’s the farthest from what I intended to write about this Monday. The issue today is the frustration of going to work on Mondays. The rush hour. The heavy traffic. For Ugandans, the traffic jam. For Ugandans again, whenever it rains, the jam doubles if not triples. I guess the reason is that the roads become more impassable because of the poor drainage which causes the flooding of the roads and hiding of the potholes. As such, drivers drive slowly so as not to mistakenly hit one. Besides, running dirty water is also strong a force it can push a car off the road so there is a need for more careful driving.

The traffic on Mondays makes you think people don’t work on other days of the week. Anyways, Mondays suck and so does the traffic on Mondays. Have a nice week ahead.