By Vijay Jayaraj
In eastern Uganda, a mother can spend two hours a day gathering firewood to cook her family’s meals. Incredibly, 85% of Ugandan households still cook with wood and 13% depend on charcoal. Smoky indoor fires are estimated to cause thousands of premature deaths in the country every year, while clean-burning liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) reaches fewer than one home in a hundred. A billion sub-Saharan Africans are without clean fuel for cooking.
Standing between life and death is the European Investment Bank (EIB), the lending arm of the European Union that ended financing for fossil-fuel projects at the end of 2021. The World Bank runs a similar playbook. Last December, it issued a $200 million Clean Cooking Outcome Bond whose Ghana projects cover 245,000 electric cookers and 170,000 improved biomass stoves but not one LPG cylinder.
The body count Brussels ignores
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), household air pollution killed an estimated 2.9 million people in 2021. Soot from cooking fires has been blamed for nearly half of all deaths from lower respiratory infections in young children. Africa bears the heaviest share with an estimated 815,000 premature deaths a year.
WHO lists LPG and natural gas among the clean cooking fuels it wants expanded. The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects gas to supply more than 60% of the African households that gain access to clean cooking through 2040. Its roadmap calls for spending about $2 billion a year to introduce clean cooking to 80 million people annually.
So, the world’s leading health agency calls LPG clean. The world’s leading energy agency calls it the main pathway out of smoke. Which guidelines, then, are the EIB and World Bank following?
Gas for me, firewood for thee
Look inside a European home. The European Heating Industry counted roughly 76.4 million installed gas boilers across the EU in 2023. Liquid Gas Europe reported that LPG met the heating needs of more than 20 million EU citizens. Eurostat data show that natural gas still delivers nearly 30% of all energy consumed by EU households, more than any other source.
Did a single European family wait for a foreign lender’s blessing before trading coal stoves for gas burners in the last century? Of course not. Gas lifted Europe’s women out of soot-filled kitchens, and they have never looked back.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia supplied about 45% of the EU’s gas and LNG imports. Brussels condemned Moscow and imposed sanctions. Yet the bloc imported a record 106 million metric tons of LNG in 2025, with Russia ranking as its second-largest supplier at about 14%.
The buying did not slow even as the ban approaches. In the first half of 2026, EU buyers took a record 9.97 million metric tons from Russia’s Yamal LNG plant, worth more than $6 billion and 16% above the year before, stocking up ahead of the full prohibition that begins at the beginning of 2027.
The double standard extends to Europe’s closest partners. Norway, bound to the EU through the European Economic Area, places no ceiling on petroleum development. Oslo awarded 57 offshore production licenses in January, after issuing 53 in 2025 and 62 in 2024. Each license grants rights to explore, drill, and extract. Across six years, Norway has handed out 333 of them. You will search in vain for an EIB statement condemning any of it.
A bloc that pays a geopolitical adversary for gas has no moral standing to deny an African widow a cooking cylinder.
Patricia Nanteza, Africa coordinator at WePlanet, told the Monitor that LPG is the most accessible clean option families have in the near term and that lifting the ban would free more households from biomass. When climate campaigners themselves plead for financing of gas, the ban has lost its last defense.
The EIB and World Bank policies that protect their climate scorecards while African women devote half their lives carrying water and children are lost to early death. That trade carries no scientific, moral, or economic justification.
Originally published at American Thinker, October 19th, 2026.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.