Black Immigrant Daily News

A High Court judge has sentenced two fishermen to 25 years in jail after they were pleaded guilty of manslaughter in the death of boat captain, Mahadeo Ramdehol, during a piracy attack in 2017

Justice Navindra Singh on Monday imposed the sentence on Doodnauth Singh, 63, and Khemraj Narsayah, 44, who appeared at the Berbice High Court last month charged with murdering the boat captain, but opted to plead guilty to the latter count of manslaughter.

The men admitted that on May 16, 2017, in the river between Tain Village and Rose Hall on the Corentyne foreshore, they killed the 57-year-old boat captain during the act of piracy.

As he was being sentenced Singh urged the judge to “give me a second chance,” while Narsayah who apologised to the family, said he did not expect for “them things to happen”.

Earlier, the victim’s family had given impact statements to the court calling for justice to be served.

The judge said while he considered the nature of the case, he was sentencing the men to 25 years imprisonment with time served on remand to be deducted.

The court heard that on May 16, 2017, the convicted men, armed with a cutlass, went out into the Corentyne River, where they attacked the boat captain, and his two crewmen, Arjun Permaul and Parmanand Nandan.

After relieving the victims of some fish and their outboard engine, they chopped Ramdehol on the head with a cutlass and forced the victims to jump overboard.

Ramdehol’s body was found the following day near the Rose Hall foreshore. A post-mortem revealed that he had drowned.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The Antigua and Barbuda government is monitoring a High Court case in Trinidad and Tobago where a judge has temporarily blocked the Immigration Department from deporting five Cameroonians who arrived last November after fleeing their homeland, fearing they would be killed by military forces.

Last week Tuesday, Justice Carol Gobin granted the application to the lawyers representing the Africans less than four hours before they were to be placed on a flight to Panama and then back to Cameroon.

Governor General Sir Rodney Williams, delivering the traditional Throne speech at the opening of the new Parliament following the January 18 general election, said the Gaston Browne administration, which is dealing with a similar situation where hundreds of people from Cameron are stranded, is aware of the High Court ruling in Port of Spain.

“My government notes with interest, the decision of the High Court in Trinidad and Tobago less than a week ago to prevent the Trinidad and Tobago government from deporting the West Africans back to their homeland.

“My government further notes that the UNHCR, (UN Refugee Agency) played a significant role in stopping the deportations. My government is required to take the High Court decision into consideration and to the role of the UNHCR prior to making its final decision,” Sir Rodney said.

Earlier this month, following the weekly Cabinet meeting, Information Minister Melford Nicholas told reporters the government had decided while West Africans will not be afforded Antiguan and Barbudan citizenship, those who choose to remain could be offered residency and work permits.

The government had previously announced that the hundreds of Africans who arrived in the country on charter flights in recent months would be allowed to remain.

“Antiguan passport? No…I don’t think that that is on the cards, but certainly the whole idea of residency and work permits, that is part of the legal framework that we are considering,” Nicholas told the media.

Nicholas said the Immigration Department had been tasked with tracking down and investigating just how many of the Africans would like to be repatriated – as the government has also offered – or remain in the country. But, according to Nicholas, Cabinet has yet to receive an update.

He did however say for those who wish to stay, government will be looking at various options to ensure they do so legally while contributing to the country’s economic growth.

Government had earlier this month said 637 of the more than 900 people who touched down between November and January remained in Antigua. Many of them are Cameroonians fleeing a bloody conflict back home.

The main opposition United Progressive Party (UPP) called for a Commission of Inquiry to determine if the authorities are engaged in human trafficking after supporters staged protest action against the government’s decision to legalize the status of hundreds of African migrants.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

By Sam Davis

Bioenergy is often seen as a more environmentally-friendly alternative to other forms of energy generation. But the truth is that it can actually be quite harmful to the environment. Bioenergy has a dark side: It contributes to air pollution.

Biomass, or bioenergy, creates energy by burning living materials like plants and trees. The wood pellet industry uses trees to make wood pellets. It then ships them to Europe and Asia and burns them in power plants to create electricity. Wood pellet plants are as dirty and problematic as coal plants.

Fossil fuel combustion in coal plants is the most common way that we produce electricity. But fossil fuels are responsible for increasing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Many countries have tried to pivot to renewable energy, but they’ve adopted bioenergy instead of truly low-carbon energies like wind and solar. This is mostly out of convenience because wood pellets can burn alongside fossil fuels like coal.

While many countries consider wood pellets “carbon neutral”, this is false. Greenhouse gas emissions from wood pellets–like carbon dioxide–are worse than coal. Europe and Asia are demanding wood pellets from the United States because it’s a “free pass” on their carbon accounting ledgers. But on the ground, burning biomass contributes to many air pollution impacts.

Traditional Biomass Burning Impacts

How do we know about the connection between biomass and air pollution? Biomass is most often used in developing countries to cook and heat the home. We’ve looked at indoor cooking smoke exposure to learn about the air pollution from burning wood. Before the 2010s, biomass was almost never used to generate household energy. Now the U.S. exports millions of tons of wood pellets every year to other countries despite the known health risks.

The household air pollution impacts from home wood burning are extensive. This domestic smoke pollution can cause:

acute lower respiratory infections
lung cancer (second only to smoking)
decreased respiratory health
exposure to carbon monoxide
increased risk of pneumonia and other acute respiratory infections
increased risk of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)

Air pollution from biomass is common in homes that heat with wood. But the industrial production and combustion of wood pellets for electricity cause many of these same impacts.

How Is Air Pollution From Bioenergy Generated?

Making wood pellets creates a variety of pollutants, including particulates (fine dust), carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and other hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). To make wood pellets, the bioenergy industry dries and crushes wood, which releases a lot of dust–also known as particulate air pollution.

Crushing wood can release other air pollution, too. For example, wood naturally contains formaldehyde. When the wood breaks down, it releases formaldehyde as fine particulate matter. This process releases other harmful chemicals as well.

Chopping wood won’t release a lot of air pollutants. Repeatedly crushing wood with big machines will. This type of dust is full of particulate air pollution, including

volatile organic compounds
specific health-damaging air pollutants like formaldehyde
fine particulate air pollution (PM 2.5 and below)

Wood pellet plants’ air permit applications usually list these air pollutants. Unfortunately, air permit applications are challenging to read. They can contain nearly a hundred pages of details.

Wood pellets also create particulate matter air pollution when they’re made. Biomass burning creates additional pollutants, too. This ambient air pollution in the destination countries is also an issue. Biomass smoke can release many of the same compounds described above. It also releases carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas that fossil fuels also produce. You can see this outdoor air pollution in pictures of the Drax power station. You can see it in other bioenergy power stations all around the world.

Beyond the air pollution impacts, we also need to consider the residues after combustion. When wood pellets are burned alone, there’s evidence that the ashes contain significant heavy metals. These are a risk when considering disposal methods. When wood pellets are cofired with coal, it’s even worse. The combined ashes contain risks from both coal ash and wood ash.

We’re only now beginning to understand the public health risks of burning biomass.

Health Effects of Outdoor and Indoor Air Pollution

Pollutants like these cause many health problems. Fine dust, called PM2.5, is especially harmful. PM2.5 can get into the lungs and bloodstream. PM2.5 can hurt lung function, worsen asthma, and cause heart attacks and premature death:

Particulate matter harms boys and children with high BMI even more than other children.
Particular matter can cause airway inflammation, especially in asthmatic children.
Particulate matter affects people more strongly in combination with higher temperatures.
It can even harm folks with asthma and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).
PM2.5 was correlated with an increase in the risk of death from COVID-19.
Air pollution also contributes to cardiovascular disease.

Pellet production plants also release volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls some VOCs hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). This includes chemicals like acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, and methanol. HAPs are chemicals that are toxic or can cause cancer, even in small amounts. VOCs and HAPs cause health problems for children, the elderly, and people with asthma or COPD:

VOCs that make it indoors can harm lung function.
Folks exposed to organic solvents like formaldehyde frequently complain of respiratory symptoms.
Female woodworkers may be more susceptible to wood dust exposure.
Increased exposure to HAPs is associated with a 9% increase in COVID-19 deaths.

People living next to pellet plants often have a lower life expectancy and poorer health. According to the American Heart Association, “Short-term exposure to small particulate matter can trigger cardiovascular disease mortality and illness; long-term exposure reduces life expectancy up to a few years.”

What You Can Do About Air Pollution

Living in dirty air is hard and dangerous. If you live near one of these facilities, there are some things you can do:

Educate yourself and your community about the dangers of air pollution. You can use this downloadable fact sheet to help.
Monitor local air quality data to protect yourself on bad air days.
Install an air monitor on your property

If you have the privilege of not living next to a wood pellet plant or other biomass facility, consider yourself lucky, and get involved in the movement.

Credit Line: This article was produced by Earth Food

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The report Global Landscape of Renewable Energy Finance 2023 reveals that global investment in energy transition technologies last year–including energy efficiency–reached USD 1.3 trillion. It set a new record-high, up 19% from 2021 investment levels, and 50% from before the pandemic in 2019.

The joint report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and Climate Policy Initiative (CPI)–launched on the side-lines of the Spanish International Conference on Renewable Energy in Madrid–also finds that, although global investment in renewable energy reached a record high of USD 0.5 trillion in 2022, this still represents less than 40% of the average investment needed each year between 2021 and 2030, according to IRENA’s 1.5?C Scenario. Investments are also not on track to achieve the goals set by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Since decentralised solutions are vital in plugging the access gap to reach universal energy access to improve livelihoods and welfare under the 2030 Agenda, efforts must be made to scale up investments in the off-grid renewables sector. Despite reaching record-high annual investments exceeding USD 0.5 billion in 2021, investment in off-grid renewable solutions falls far short of the USD 2.3 billion needed annually in the sector between 2021 and 2030.

Furthermore, investments have become concentrated in specific technologies and uses. In 2020, solar photovoltaic alone attracted 43% of the total investment in renewables, followed by onshore and offshore wind at 35% and 12% shares, respectively. Based on preliminary figures, this concentration seems to have continued to the year of 2022. To best support the energy transition, more funds need to flow to less mature technologies as well as to other sectors beyond electricity such as heating, cooling, and system integration.

Comparing renewables financing across countries and regions, the report shows that glaring disparities have increased significantly over the last six years. About 70% of the world’s population, mostly residing in developing and emerging countries, received only 15% of global investments in 2020. Sub-Saharan Africa for example, received less than 1.5% of the amount invested globally between 2000 and 2020. In 2021, investment per capita in Europe was 127 times that in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 179 times more in North America.

The report emphasises how lending to developing countries looking to deploy renewables must be reformed, and highlights the need for public financing to play a much stronger role, beyond mitigating investment risks. Recognising the limited public funds available in the developing world, the report calls for stronger international collaboration, including a substantial increase in financial flows from the Global North to the Global South.

“For the energy transition to improve lives and livelihoods, governments and development partners need to ensure a more equitable flow of finance, by recognising the different contexts and needs,” says IRENA Director-General, Francesco La Camera. “This joint report underscores the need to direct public funds to regions and countries with a lot of untapped renewables potential but find it difficult to attract investment. International cooperation must aim at directing these funds to enabling policy frameworks, the development of energy transition infrastructure, and to address persistent socio-economic gaps.”

Achieving an energy transition in line with the 1.5?C Scenario also requires the redirection of USD 0.7 trillion per year from fossil fuels to energy-transition?-related technologies. But following a brief decline in 2020 due to COVID-19, fossil fuel investments are now on the rise. Some large multi-national banks have even increased their investments in fossil fuels at an average of about USD 0.75 trillion dollars a year since the Paris Agreement.

In addition, the fossil fuel industry continues to benefit from subsidies, which doubled in 2021 across 51 countries. The phasing out of investments in fossil fuel assets should be coupled with the elimination of subsidies to level the playing field with renewables. However, the phaseout of subsidies needs to be accompanied by a proper safety net to ensure adequate standards of living for vulnerable populations.

Barbara Buchner, CPI’s Global Managing Director says, “The path to net zero can only happen with a just and equitable energy transition. While our numbers show that there were record levels of investment for renewables last year, a greater scale-up is critically needed to avoid dangerous climate change, particularly in developing countries.”

This is the third edition of the biannual joint report by IRENA and CPI. This report series analyses investment trends by technology, sector, region, source of finance, and financial instrument. It also analyses financing gaps, aiming to support informed policy making to deploy renewables at the scale needed to accelerate the energy transition. This third edition looks at the period of 2013-2020 and provides preliminary insights and figures for 2021 and 2022.

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