The gap between Paris, home of last year’s Climate Change Conference, and Po, a tiny town in the impoverished African country of Burkina Faso, is actually far wider than the 5500km on a map, it calls for a trip which means leaving the First World and entering the Stone Age.

Residents of Po, if they ever get to read this latest rant from The Hog, might object to that description but given Burkina Faso’s low ranking on all world-development measures, including 210th on the life expectancy list and 212th on the income list ($US1700 per person per year) they haven’t got much of a case.

The shame is that with a little investment in the services that people in Paris enjoy Po could be uplifted, and the key to that uplift is electricity – and that does not mean a few solar panels to power a mobile phone or run a few lights, it means power to develop industries.

By now a reader will know where this argument is going, it’s the familiar one about the western world giving coal the thumbs down and the developing world saying we’re we want you’ve got.

Two events triggered this latest examination of the respective standings of the first-and-emerging worlds in the case for-and-against coal. They are:

News that Rio Tinto has sold another coal asset, this time the Mount Pleasant coal deposit in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales to a group led by Indonesia’s Salim group for a lowly $US224 million, and

The latest thoughts from renowned climate-change sceptic, Bjorn Lomborg, which might one day be made into a film titled “An Inconvenient Truth, Act 2”, to sit alongside the original film about truth which won an Oscar for former US vice-president, Al Gore.

The Mount Pleasant deal is the one which will have tongues wagging over the next few days with most media coverage likely to focus on the exit of Rio Tinto from a coal deposit that has the potential to be a big mine with low costs if integrated with other nearby mines.

The flipside of the case for selling is the that someone reckoned that Mount Pleasant has a viable future and that someone is an Indonesia investor with a deep understanding of the coal business and demand for coal in emerging countries, such as Indonesia, much of Asia and most of Africa.

Lomborg, a controversial figure who insists on speaking his mind and delights in annoying the climate change lobby, was scathing in his latest attack on the deal negotiated in Paris with its aim to drive coal (and oil) out of the global energy sector.

What really got up Lomborg’s nose was the apparent lack of interest in the difference between the relatively easy life of people in the first world and the daily grind of simply surviving in the emerging world.

Po, the town chosen by The Hog as a case study for comparing Paris with Africa is a perfect example being part of a country with a population not much smaller than Australia but with 80% of its 19 million people trapped in subsidence farming, with a small amount of cash income from growing cotton, peanuts and sesame seed, while also digging up gold.

These unbearably poor are the people on Lomborg’s watch list because they also qualify as major users of “renewable” power – burning wood and animal dung.

Coal is what Burkina Faso needs and, like other poor African countries, will go about getting its own.

Two of the better examples used by Lomborg to make his case for using fossil fuels as a way of uplifting emerging economies so they can eventually afford other forms of power were the rate of growth in Africa and the attitude of the locals.

According to the Danish economist and author of “The Sceptical Environmentalist”, the use of solar power in sub-Saharan Africa by the year 2040 will grow to 14 kilowatt hours per person, less than what’s needed to keep a single two-watt LED alight permanently – and it will cost more than any other power source.

Lomborg’s second example was the reaction of Tanzania’s Minister for Minerals and Energy, Sospeter Muhongo, to a talk by US President, Barak Obama, at a summit of African leaders in 2014.

At that meeting Obama was banging on about the need for more solar panels and wind turbines in Africa, to which the Tanzanian Minister said: “We will start intensifying the utilization of coal. Why shouldn’t we use coal when there are other countries where their carbon dioxide per capita is so high?

“We will just go ahead,” Muhongo said.

Tanzania and Burkina Faso, these are the sort of places were coal use is growing, and while most Australians do not even know where they are Indonesia does and it will meet their demand, either from coal mined there, or in mines Indonesian companies develops in Australia.