I would personally like to invite all citizens of Chad to go live in Big Al Gore’s mansion. It has plenty of hot & cold running water, and uses electricity by the bazilowatt. Best of all, you will be fully protected from the ManBearPig. I’m cereal.

Few climate actions, however, come close to the travesty being played out in nearby Chad. There the government has banned the manufacture, importation and use of charcoal – the sole source of fuel for 99% of Chadians.

“Cooking is a fundamental necessity for every household,” its Environment Minister pronounced. But “with climate change every citizen must protect his environment.”

The edict has sent women and children scavenging for dead branches, cow dung, grass and anything else that burns. “People cannot cook,” said human rights activist Merlin Totinon Nguebetan. “Women giving birth cannot even find a bit of charcoal to heat water for washing,” said another.

The government admitted it had failed to prepare the public for its sudden decree, but announced no change in plans – saying only that scarce propane might be an alternative for some. When citizens protested, they were violently dispersed by police.

No need, Chadians, to bring your own cow dung. Al Gore has enough bullshit for everyone.

This is the law of unintended consequences. When white liberal guilt over some imaginary wrong (be it Native rights, spanking kids, peanut allergies or global warming) gets out of hand, it is always the very poorest who suffer. No, not TaLinda and DaShawn in some ghetto slum paid for with welfare dough in a rich city in a rich country like America. I mean places like Africa, where people are really poor, but it doesn’t matter because we can’t see them, so fuck ‘em.

We scream about the atrocities in Darfur, but the best we can send by way of aid is Matt Damon. We wail about what happened in Rwanda, yet it was white liberals who tied the hands of the UN forces and made them impotent. We worry about the millions of deaths caused by malaria, but cannot bring ourselves to use DDT, lest a few hundred people have a bad reaction to it and die. We lament about the amount of people who contract AIDS, but we pooh-pooh Uganda’s successful ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful, use Condoms) abstinence education (pretty simple, really: If you don’t have sex, you don’t get sexual diseases).

Time after time our experiments in white guilt have led to things we really ought to feel guilty about. But because they happen so far away, we really don’t care. Let ‘em starve. Let the women and babies have their infections because the most rudimentary disinfection provided by boiling water has been denied. At least we won’t be using coal, which will hurt people.

Finally, a positive outcome from the election.

Little black girls will be growing up with names that will allow them to be employed. It’s about bloody time.

Take that, Shaniqua.

What have you done lately to help yourselves?

Eighteen-, 19- and 20-year-old Namibian students, who otherwise would be settling into their local villages during the university winter break, sit in chairs arranged in a semicircle and begin to tackle a question that has frustrated and eluded many for years:

Why has HIV, the virus that tears apart the human immune system, savaged their nation to the point where one out of every five citizens now carries the it?

The statistics are hard to come to grips with – 20 per cent of the nation’s people, and in some areas of Namibia like the Caprivi region, close to an astounding 40 per cent carry the virus.

The students, attending a workshop run by the University of Namibia’s HIV/AIDS peer education program, blame poverty, inequality, underdevelopment and even the lingering travesties of colonialism for their country’s predicament. They even blame themselves and their fellow citizens for abusing alcohol, not using condoms or for having multiple sexual partners.

Themselves? Really? Who woulda thunk it? After all, the colonialists are not grabbing every African dick and shoving it into the nearest available hole, are they? I sincerely doubt the diamond trade - or even the slave trade - had much to do with Africans not being able to keep it in their pants. How about learning a little personal responsibility and a few morals, then see what happens.

And if you get the hang of it in Africa, come on over and teach our gay communities a thing or two about how barebacking just isn’t cool.