My bet is on auto-regulation. .

It happened again and again in the past. For example for tobacco, leaded gasoline, banned pesticides (banned in the Western world), banned dirty fuel, etc. Whenever the West moves on into new tech, regulations, lifestyle, the old stuff gets dumped into African countries.

For two main reasons:

1. African legislator don't immediately "copy-past" Western laws. And by the time they realize their mistake, it's usually too late, as powerful lobbies and private interests resist any change (e.g. African countries have unsuccessfully tried several times to ban 2nd hand clothing. But the economics are just too powerful, and they get bullied into giving up any bans)

2. prices. As soon as the Western world bans traditional cars (i.e. internal combustion vehicles), their prices will collapse. And Africans will buy them.

And most interestingly, if the same patterns continue, Western companies will have branches in African countries making internal combustion cars for the African markets. (just like DDT is still being made and sold in Africa, even though it has been banned in the Western world since the 1970s already... and by Western branches or Western owned companies)

Capitalism is super weird. It has no ethics, nor a humane/STEM logic, only greed...

There are now tons of studies showing that it isn't necessarily an individual problem for the vast majority of people suffering from mental health. But a huge systemic and societal one. Studies after studies demonstrate that air quality is crucial to prevent depression and anxiety, that most homes and buildings have neurotoxic offgasing, that out-door air qualities in cities is even worse. And that the probability to suffer from depression and anxiety in this environment strongly increases. Same thing with artificial lighting, junk food, and lack of physical exercises...

It's time to work and intervene like animal biologists do. It's time to fix our environment and food. And make them suitable for human mental and neurological health, among others.

Time to choose building materials, food ingredients, and artificial lighting that enhance human health, not harm it. And really time to strongly improve outdoor air quality in cities... We can't continue to make individual people carry the costs and burden of grave societal mistakes...

I agree that development requires stability. But IMHO the biggest problem African countries face today is the unfair and scandalous economic warfare: e.g. dumping of subsidized goods and services into African markets.

Heavily subsidized Western agricultural goods have ruined African agribusiness, and kept over 70% of African in subsistence farming (as customers would rather buy cheap Western staple food, than local ones. And thus agribusiness is unprofitable, and banks make no loans for a green revolution, i.e. mechanization, modern tools, better fertilizers, pesticides, etc Basically, most Africans still farm like Europe used to do in the Middle Ages....).

Another very obvious ones are 2nd hand stuff, from clothes, to bicycles. These goods devastated entire industries. Just one example, in the early 80s, Kenya had over 500k workers in the textile industry. Then came IMF/world bank imposed austerity on steroids, blind deregulation and privatizations, and indiscriminate opening of borders to all Western goods, including 2nd hand clothes. By late 1980s, the Kenyan textile industry collapsed to just 20k workers, and mostly focused only on the 2nd hand clothing industry... quiet a tragedy! Millions lost their jobs on the continent. And the African street wear was forever changed. For the worse.

And last but not least, most of international aid money is used to pay the donor country's own companies to provide services/goods to African country. For example, a few years ago, a West African country wanted to create a form of eGovernment, or at least an online presence with a platform for its population to use for many different basic bureaucratic necessities, as to streamline governmental services, reducing costs and waiting time for tax-payers and citizens (and donors of course).

Anyways, there was a fair competition. And an African software company won the bid. It was simply better, and cheaper. However, a French company that had also participated and lost (too expensive, too over-engineered, culturally insensitive to local taste, est. ), lobbied the French government. And France in turn blackmailed that country to either give the contract to a French company or risk losing a good chunk of its aid money.... WTF!?! That's just one example.

But there are many other examples of aid money actually benefiting Western and other rich countries' companies and economy, while making African countries carry the debt, and the often useless/in adapted infrastructure and other goods/services.

By reading the article, I got the feeling that they could re-create the stories they heard. Not the exact wordings, but they still get the story right.

Have I misunderstood something? Isn't that huge?

My African family still lives today in the ways of our ancestors: traditional subsistence farming, in natures rhythm. With little to no modern objects. (although, we did start to finance them modern tools, such as a electric stove, solar panels, etc. ).

When I visited them, they would ask question about life in the West. And I would tell them as best I could using simple words that they can understand in their context. And oh my God, the present is already bleak. Very bleak. I realized that while telling them, and they often looked at me with shock and horror.

There's also the stories of hunter-gatherer people from the Amazon forests and the Congo rain forests being invited to visit New-York. Usually, they hate it. The noise, the smells, the dirt, the food, the artificial lights, etc. They even felt ill often.

The only people who love developed Western world are those that have already lived in cities in the developing world. As it's an improvement for them. But for people like my African family, and for hunter gatherers, cities and modern development, be they Western or 3rd world, are usually hated as they look very dystopian for them.

If we were able to cooperate globally, we would already have an international super grid (loss of only about 1 to 5 percent energy per 1000 km(. And we would already have had huge solar panel parks in China's Gobi desert, in Australia, in India's desert, in the Sahara desert, and n the deserts of the Americas, and connecting them all. So that whenever it's night time in a region, that region imports solar power from regions that are exposed to the sun. Such a super grid would also allow to export excess energy from other renewables, and import when there's, for example, less wind.

Only about 100k km^2 of solar panels are enough to meet today's global demand. But we need two or three times more so they can be placed strategically over the world, and always be producing enough solar energy. Anyway, those 100k km square are about 1 percent of the Sahara Desert, and about 5 to 10 percent of the Great North American Desert). Also, keep in mind that the world would also supply wind, tidal, hydro and geothermal energy, among many others. So we don't even need 100k km square of panels...

Parking lots are relatively rare in Europe...