Chris Wright: That’s happening today. That’s happening today. It was one of the reasons, John. As you know, we’ve held this belief of what’s going on with the electricity market for years. So when we got into building our digiFleets, it was — if we count on a third party that’s going to do that, a third party is not necessarily an oil and gas company, if the market switches and they can drive all those things over to data centers or for manufacturing thing — but no we’re at the mercy of a business that’s not ours. And we just decided that was a risk we didn’t want to take.
John Daniel: Okay, make sense. Thank you for [indiscernible]
Chris Wright: Thanks, John. Take care.
Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I will now turn it back to Chris for closing remarks.
Chris Wright: Thanks, everyone. In early February, we released our comprehensive report Bettering Human Lives 2024 that covers energy, climate change, poverty and prosperity. I spent many weekends and evenings writing this report. But what I’m most proud of was not written by me. It was the words in the letter from Anne Hyre, the Executive Director of our newly formed Bettering Human Lives Foundation. The BHL Foundation is the culmination of our studies into the world’s biggest solvable problems and our passion to play a meaningful role in changing the lives of millions. Anne’s letter says it best, and I will read the full text now. Despite significant cultural and geographical differences among countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the scenes outside the window as I drive from town to town are remarkably similar and all include women and girls standing in lines at water pumps, walking in groups in search of firewood and cow dung and carrying heavy loads of firewood and water filled buckets, whether in Malawi, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia or Kenya, I pass clusters of homes and see women cooking amidst harmful smoke from open fires that are fueled by wood or cow dung.
We are in the year 2023. How is this acceptable? I feel so disheartened that the daily lives of women and girls in many lower-income countries continue to be filled with tedious physically demanding and often dangerous task of collecting fuel and water for cooking, cleaning, laundry and heating homes. I am a nurse midwife and I’ve spent 30 years working to improve quality health services for women during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period. For 25 years, I worked primarily in Southeast Asia, where access to energy and economic growth contributed to visible progress in improving health and quality of life. For the past five years, my work has shifted to Sub-Saharan Africa, and I have encountered a very different reality. Governments and donors have made huge investments in health over decades, and yet most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa remain far from reaching global targets for development in any social sector, including maternal and newborn health.
I continually ask myself, how can a woman possibly enjoy a healthy pregnancy, access health services and demand better quality services when she spends her time collecting firewood, cooking over polluting stoves and missing out on education and revenue-generating activities that ultimately translate into her ability to make decisions and take actions to improve her family’s well-being. Better health services are essential, but far from sufficient. There is a great need to tackle more fundamental problems that perpetually constrain women and their families. A clean burning cook stove such as those powered by liquefied petroleum gas, LPG or propane can be a life changer for families, particularly women and girls. It liberates them from the drudgery of collecting fuel and cooking in smoke-filled spaces, affording them time for school or other income-generating activities.
It immediately improves their health, safety and quality of life. Through the Bettering Human Lives foundation, Liberty will mobilize financial and human resources to support LPG and cookstove entrepreneurs and innovators in Africa and in Asia with one goal in mind, get a clean cookstove into 1 million households. As a midwife and a mother, my heart breaks when I see postpartum mother and her newborns inside dark smoke-filled homes. I am eager to get on a more impactful path towards Bettering Human Lives. Thank you, everyone, for your time today for the call, and we hope you’ll join us in supporting our efforts to the Bettering Human Lives Foundation. We’ll talk to you all next quarter.
Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.
