I recently returned from a trip to Mongolia, a beautiful country with welcoming people, a bustling and growing economy... and where much of the cooking and heating is still done with coal. Their capital Ulaanbaatar (about the size of Calgary) is littered with smoke stacks, traffic congestion is insane, my tap water had a brown tinge, and the air had a noticeable acidic bite to it. I had a headache the entire time I was in the city... I can just image the long-term health impacts it has on their local population. If there's ever a city that truly deserves to declare a "climate emergency", it is it.
They have no natural gas in Mongolia. Needless to say, helping it to transition even partially to the most basic form of natural gas would be a massive difference maker, both in terms of environmental impact and basic quality of life. If we in the west truly want to make a global impact, these are the types of places we need to be sending our capital and expertise.
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