Speaking at a town hall event in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Saturday, President Barack Obama claimed that "the planet will boil over" if everyone has access to air conditioning, automobiles and big houses.
That is, unless the world finds "new ways of producing energy," he said.
Credit: Getty Images
“Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over -- unless we find new ways of producing energy," Obama said.
The president made the comments while speaking at the University of Johannesburg-Soweto on Saturday, one day before announcing his “Power Africa” initiative for a “sustainable” African energy strategy.
Watch below:
More from CNSNews.com:
According to Obama, global warming constitutes “the biggest challenge we have environmentally,” one greater than all other environmental calamities like “dirty water, dirty air.”However, the President’s statements do not reflect statistics released by the United Nations: Based on a data released in October, 2012, the World Health Organization estimated that “Global warming” is responsible for approximately 140,000 excess deaths each year.
By comparison, as many as three million people died from indoor and outdoor air pollution – in other words, over 20 times the number of alleged victims of global warming, according to the Word Health Organization.
The list of victims of unclean drinking water is even more staggering.
According to UNESCO, unsanitized water causes billions of preventable diseases annually, from diarrhea (4 billion), cholera (120,000), malaria (300-500 million), intestinal parasites (25% of world’s population), typhoid (12 million), trachoma (6 million), and schistosomiesis (200 million). list from highest to least affected
–
[related]
