Watch out, Africa, Obama plans to paint the whole world green

US President-elect Barack Obama continues to excite.

The star cast he has named to be his science advisers, and in particular his picking of Steven Chu, the 1997 Nobel laureate in Physics, to run the Department of Energy, has environmentalists in the US and the world swooning.

President George Bush’s administration displayed a peculiar hostility to science, rejecting all the research that showed that human activities were responsible for global warming, and scuttling all attempts to reach credible global carbon emissions targets.

Now that his appointments suggest that Obama will finally get America working seriously on green technologies, alternative energies, and possibly even assume leadership in dealing with global environmental crises, Africa needs to pay attention to how that will affect it.

For all the talk of US decline, it will probably be towards the end of the 21st century before a China or India overtakes America in science, if at all.

As many observers have noted, just as it did in 1941 when it threw its heart into the Second World War, if the US decides to make green technology work, it will.

And because of its size, together with countries like Japan and Germany that are quite advanced in several areas of green technology, it could immediately make the goal of saving the world from an environmental disaster a realistic one.

That will mean any economy that wants to be competitive will have to retool with machinery that is more fuel-efficient, and shift to hybrid, electric or hydrogen-fuelled cars, and so on.

With the new energies, large companies that are reliant on solar power to run their businesses can also use the same source to power their cars.

All employees, if they shifted to solar-powered cars, would therefore “refuel” at work.

Many homes, likewise, will use solar electricity for domestic energy, and also recharge the car with it.

Africa, which is already having trouble with infrastructure, could find that in eight years it will have to discard the ramshackle facilities it has built over the decades, for green ones.

If the leading car makers will mostly be making vehicles that run on non-fossil fuels, and Africa has to import new cars (at least for its presidents and other Big Men and Women), then it will have to invest in green fuel delivery.

The alternative is that it will become a dumping site which will serve to set the continent back economically.

Africa will need a lot of green specialists, and big money for these conversions, both of which it doesn’t have now and hasn’t started planning for either.

Hence the great irony: If Obama succeeds in pushing the science agenda (throw stem cell research in the mix) that environmentalists and other progressive forces in the world are looking to him to do and save the world, then Africa could be hit particularly hard because we aren’t prepared for this transition.

I know only two African presidents who have science advisers, but I am aware of many who are still steeped in superstition and witchcraft.

In fact, Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh is the country’s leading medicine man, concocting “cures” for all diseases, from Aids to diabetes, in the State House kitchen sink!

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s managing editor for convergence and new products. E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke