Is that before or after the global freeze promised in the 1970s, or the population explosion? or any one of the other catastrophic ends-to-the-world that “scientists” have been warning about in order to end the current world order and bring in their idea of utopia? It’s all models, Joe. It’s all models. It’s a theory. Climate alarmism keeps millions of scientists engaged and paid for by the billionaire corporate elite who want to rule the world in perpetuity by destroying upstart nations who have the temerity to climb the economic ladder their own way.
I’ve been waiting for any sign of this sea level rise for as long as activists have been going on about it. That’s more than twenty years! The places I visit are all sandy beaches or salt marshes, both very vulnerable to rising waters. Guess what. Not a sign!
I’ve seen this before. And much more.
As to the graph from NASA, it’s a bit dishonest. The extremely short time period makes the increase look quite large. In reality the rise is right in line with the rise that’s been going on for centuries now, long before the rise in CO2. The French port of Brest has records going back to 1807. Check out https://tidesandcurrents.NOAA.gov/sltrends/ ; hundreds of records from all around the West. We’ve been dealing with a rise of approx. 1ft/100years for a very long time. Why the sudden panic?
Even if I wasn’t interested in sea level rise I still wouldn’t like it when people try to pull the wool over my eyes.
These sea rise level claims come from models. Models are only ever as good as the assumptions built in to them. What we are seeing from sea rise levels so far is that the models are incorrect. The IPCC report AR6 WG1 reports a medium level confidence of some sea level rises by 2050. The extreme claims come from using a model called RCP8.5 which is an unlikely scenario well above where the world is headed.
All hail, the new colonialism! Who cares about poverty in Africa, when there’s some lovely virtue-signalling to be done? In the West, we adore what the Australian politician Paul Keating calls ‘the politics of the warm inner glow’.
These poor Africans, well, you can’t really expect them to understand climate change, can you? So we just have to give them a little pat on the head and do the thinking for them. They’ll thank us for it in the end.
And who are we to call them impoverished if we are only using Western standards? They may feel very wealthy according to their own standards.
Andrew H
6 months ago
This is absolutely spot on. Glad to see the West’s patronising neo-colonialism being called out for exactly what it is. Some UK-based aid organisations such as Oxfam and Comic (sic) Relief spearhead this ideology, encouraging guilty westerners to give the gift of a goat (!) – because that’s what an African will be grateful for, after all. And the only power poor Africans should be allowed is the Oxfam-friendly kind: wind and solar, i.e. intermittent and unreliable, but that’ll do for those Africans. Meanwhile, ever pragmatic China continues to pursue enlightened self-interest and ignore these hand-wringing idiots by supporting projects that deliver useful, reliable energy.
The only idiots and ideologues in this conversation are the wishful thinkers who insist that business as usual is sustainable. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming, and the lack of seriousness on display here only strengthens the case for shutting down the global market for fossil fuels. Mudslinging won’t help Africa or stop rising sea levels.
OK, business as usual isn’t going to help. But a massive expansion of fossil-fuelled energy most certainly will help those with minimal access to energy and therefore condemned to poverty.
The evidence to the contrary is most certainly not overwhelming although media organisations will try to convince you it is. If you’d care to do serious unbiased research, scientists certainly are not unanimous in their support of the climate catastrophe rhetoric. Quite the opposite in fact as the cracks begin to appear in the current scientific narrative.
As usual, the “cracks” objection – that a very large (yes, overwhelming by any reasonable standard) majority view doesn’t amount to consensus – betrays a failure to understand or accept what constitutes scientific evidence: the most inclusive explanation of the available data. Your idea of “serious and unbiased” clearly differs from mine. (Hint: I’m not a Daily Mail reader.)
Gallileo Gallilei refused to accept that he was wrong despite everyone doing their best, including by killing him, to convince him he was wrong.
He was right. The infantile argument “everyone agrees with me so there” has not won a debate in yonks, you need a new approach.
“business as usual” in the West has meant funnelling huge resources to inadequate wind and solar farms while trying to destroy the hydrocarbons industry. That will lead to worse outcomes than any climate apocalypse.
The resources currently invested in renewables are dwarfed by the subsidies, incentives and short termist political cowardice that keep the fossil industries in business. Redirect investment and hydrocarbon profits on the basis of polluter pays, and green economics wins hands down.
Please detail the subsidies given to hydrocarbons. Every time somebody posts a link to justify that claims it’s to some idea that anything less than 100% tax is arguably a subsidy. Or that energy price caps for domestic consumers are somehow a subsidy to producers. Meanwhile in the UK oil and gas companies pay a supertax on profits of 75% which has already led to cancellations of projects and thousands of job losses. Not to mention the vast compulsory and voluntary subsidies oil and gas companies invest in wind and solar. Or the legal obligation of power stations to take wind and solar generated power electricity before any other source. Very expensive for consumers as you may imagine, given the intermittency and unreliability of wind and solar.
The problem you have is Scientism – “the science is certain and we own the science” – science is never certain but contingent – if the facts change scientists change their minds – and should never depend on “authority” if what they see in their investigations leads them to alternative – provable – explanations.
But of course most of them “just follow the money” and toe the line – a state of moral turpitude and corruption.
To the detriment of us all-in so many nefarious cases.
I do not take my climate science advice from a $billionaire who flies about the world in private jets – while at the same time telling the biggest and Most brazen lies in all of history – to deny us a warm and well fed comfortable life – now that we know New York was not inundated by 39ft flooding in 2012 – research your own facts – own your own opinions and you WILL be truly happy
CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has risen from around 300 millionths to 420 millionths. When the dinosaurs were wiped out the concentration was 6,000 millionths. Are you sure CO2 is the culprit here and not changes in solar activity?
Malcolm Webb
6 months ago
Very good and perceptive article which comes to exactly the right conclusions on the economic and moral imperative for Africa making full use of its reserves of fossil fuels.
Fazi is wrong, again. The problem is that they won’t use these reserves in a constructive manner. Corruption is a way of life in Africa, so where there is fossil fuels they will be sold and exported for cash, just in the same way as starving nations grow and export crops instead of feeding themselves.
This can’t happen with renewables.
This article presupposes that because Africans consume little energy, and because so many Africans are in poverty, the absence of energy must be the cause of the poverty.
This has it all backward: people consume little energy because they are poor.
They are not poor because of no fossil fuels but because of four things rarely discussed these days: 1. Incompetent governance, 2. Theft of resources by government and 3. Runaway population growth that puts downward pressure on wages and 4. The absence of education, which means that there is little value added by those who do work.
I can assure you that as someone who lives in Zimbabwe that I have never once heard anyone show any concern for net zero energy at all. Any shortages, where they exist, are not because of the Western Bogeyman but because the government have stolen the money that was supposed to be used to build new power stations and they’ve neglected and ruined the ones that still remain.
South Africa’s Eskom, likewise, has one of the dirtiest carbon footprints on the planet with 1kW of electricity producing 1kg of CO2. Do they ever talk about decarbonising it? Is South Africa’s energy woes down to net zero panic induced by pandering to Western climate activists?
No, it’s about the fact that Eskom has systematically fleeced South African tax payers of about 140 billion dollars since 2009, and built nothing with it. Nothing.
Pull the asparagus out of your ears Thomas.
“Africa possesses vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. But extracting those resources and using them for domestic development requires money, infrastructure, expertise and institutional capacity — which Africa’s poorest nations, especially in the sub-Sahara, sadly lack. One solution is partnering with foreign energy companies — until recently, mostly European and American firms — but that means that much of the domestically produced gas and oil is then exported rather than used for local development.”
What is meant by “partnering with foreign energy companies”? How is this a solution? It seems to me a trite statement: all the more so for the follow-up point that about the oil being exported and not used for local development. Why should foreign energy companies partner with corrupt African entities (nations and businesses) in order to fund local energy needs? Africa itself needs to exploit it vast natural resources, which include the trillions upon trillions of dollars over decades of foreign aid, not to mention the trillions invested during the colonial era. But all that massive wealth has been plundered, squandered and squirrelled into overseas bank accounts by the continent’s Big Men, who’ve left the majority of their fellows to scratch a subsistence living from the earth beneath their feet. The huge population explosion in Africa (forecasts predict one billion people by the end of the 21st Century) is another disaster in that nobody anywhere, in Africa or the wider world, is acknowledging let alone addressing.
Africa’s own oil companies, and I have dealt with many, are hopelessly corrupt and incompetent. Especially the nationalised ones, which are the majority.
Arkadian X
6 months ago
“This is a self-evident global truth. Europe and North America, the wealthiest regions on the planet, are also those with the highest per capita CO2 emissions”
How meaningful are such statistics? Maybe you find out that Lichtenstein is the state with the highest per capita emission.
And per capita emissions is not the only correlation.
David McKee
6 months ago
The irony is that Africa is rich in renewable energy. The Grand Inga Dam on the River Congo should provide hydro power for almost the entire continent. Should. Problem is that Grand Inga is Africa’s equivalent of HS2. The reasons are different, but the delay’s the same.
I know many environmentalists. but not a single one that is in favour of dam-building. Many would rather do whatever they can to oppose and obstruct such projects.
William Shaw
6 months ago
The unasked question is “If Africa is so rich in natural resources why is it so poor and why are so many people living in poverty.”
I don’t mean today with the excuse of colonialism, I mean why did relatively resource poor Europe advance so spectacularly during the agricultural and industrial revolutions while Africa remained a backwater?
During the past 1000 years what has prevented Africans from developing their resources to become rich and successful?
Last edited 6 months ago by William Shaw
Bret Larson
6 months ago
Which of course is the reason why per capita emissions convey no information beyond, “they may be more productive per person. What you do with those emissions, eg provide commodities for other people or go on vacations, is of the import. Course, per capita allows governments to buy votes in populous districts, so it’s not going away soon. And yes, net zero is just as dangerous for “advanced” economies.
Last edited 6 months ago by Bret Larson
Tom Condray
6 months ago
A century from now historians will weigh the depredations of colonialism practiced by European countries against the benevolent energy dictatorship now practiced by our wiser heads who know best how to provide energy to Africa.
I suspect a rudimentary accounting of the deaths attributable to 19th and early 20th Century imperialism will be dwarfed by the tens of millions of African citizens who already have, and in the near future will, perish from malnutrition, disease and the other scourges of poverty while those wiser heads withhold the very means to rescue them from their wholly avoidable fate.
Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin were just amateurs compared with this crowd.
Last edited 6 months ago by Tom Condray
laurence scaduto
6 months ago
So,in effect, if the Africans develop and empower themselves using gas, instead of the more problematic oil, especially considering the increases in general mechanical efficiency realized over the last hundred years, they will be far “greener” than the rest of us. Any wind or solar power they toss into the mix will just be frosting on the cake.
What a delicious irony!
John Riordan
6 months ago
Excellent article and I would like to particularly endorse the point that Western opposition to hydrocarbon development in Africa is an offence to reason and decency. All on its own it disqualifies any western diplomat or politician from any entitlement to be taken seriously.
If we in the West end up importing hydrocarbon or renewable energy from Africa we are going to be very lucky that we’re even able to do so, given the disgraceful dismissive arrogance we’ve displayed towards the wholly legitimate ambition of African nations to achieve the living standards we ourselves take for granted.
Paul T
6 months ago
There is a sleight of hand that always goes with these discussions of who exactly is “really” emitting. They will say “but we have exported our emissions so we should include those of China as our own”. This misses a large part of the whole discussion.
Did China actively seek to increase its share of global manufacturing? Yes
Did China receive fair payment for that manufacturing? Yes
Has China become rich and used that money to alleviate poverty in its own country? Yes.
Is China a grown up country, able to feed, house and employ its people; Yes.
Is it able to answer for itself and its decisions? Yes.
Is China keeping a big list of self-loathing westerners that will be rewarded for putting the west down and infantilising everyone else? No, it really isn’t.
Alex Carnegie
6 months ago
Further proof of the proposition that ”decarbonising” the economy will not happen by diktat but only by innovation leading to green technologies that are cheaper than their fossil fuel equivalents e.g. solar power has dropped in cost by 95%+ and now undercuts coal, oil and gas. It only makes sense of course if energy can be stored but fortunately lithium ion batteries have also dropped by 95%+ and other innovations suggest further falls are likely. Even in those sectors where these breakthroughs have yet to be commercialised e.g. air travel, cement or transmission promising innovations encourage long term confidence.
Africa will switch away from fossil fuels when the economics are attractive not because they are coerced or preached at.
The surprising hero of this story is George W Bush who argued for an innovation based approach twenty years ago. Those who have been proven wrong were the activists who argued for a crusade against consumption, cars, meat etc since technological solutions were unproven and improbable.
We look forward to these massive savings from 95% cheaper solar and batteries filtering through to our domestic bill. So far they have been illusory.
Or is it that the remaining 5% is still too expensive?
Andrew McDonald
6 months ago
Nuclear energy is not ‘fully carbon free.’ A common misconception- the operating phase of a reactor might be (might…), but a full life cycle analysis will show that getting the fuel out of of the ground will make a nuclear reactor less carbon-efficient than a natural gas plant, and that’s before you DCO sided the carbon load of pouring the concrete for the beast itself, and the virtually unknown impact of decommissioning and making the ‘spent’ fuel safe.
You might want to build one anyway, but nuclear reactors are not carbon free over their lifecycle, nor do they run uninterruptedly to produce ‘baseload’ energy.
And the use of at least 6 18-wheel, diesel burning tractor trailers to deliver the 3 massive blades and huge pole sections to each and every installation across the land.
Your argument is intellectually dishonest if presented as a defence for renewables because renewables also present a very large CO2 emissions cost as part of their construction, maintenance and decommissioning.
As for the mining costs, I would like to see some proof that this is so large as to reduce the emissions efficiency of nuclear to below natural gas on a lifecycle basis. I simply do not believe this. I accept that in a mixed-source energy system the mining and processing of fissile reactor feedstocks will emit CO2 simply because most of our energy presently still comes from hydrocarbons. But the context of this debate is the replacement of hydrocarbon energy with alternatives, and nuclear energy has the capacity to do this at a much faster rate than renewable energy does (which is effectively never, in my opinion).
Last edited 6 months ago by John Riordan
Robbie K
6 months ago
Inhuman ideology? You’ve surpassed yourself this time Fazi.
I’ve said it many times, economic protectionism will be our undoing in this matter.
I disagree. Given the enormous scale of development in nuclear energy required to actually displace hydrocarbons, it would be better to just go full-on nuclear.
Fossil fuel development is one of the best things to happen to mankind. We shouldn’t ban it; we should celebrate it.
Well said..
Hear hear!
Try peddling this low grade debating society nonsense as rising sea levels capsize economic growth – and not just in the Global South. https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/rising-sea-levels-death-sentence-united-nations-antonio-guterres-mega-cities-every-continent/#
Is that before or after the global freeze promised in the 1970s, or the population explosion? or any one of the other catastrophic ends-to-the-world that “scientists” have been warning about in order to end the current world order and bring in their idea of utopia? It’s all models, Joe. It’s all models. It’s a theory. Climate alarmism keeps millions of scientists engaged and paid for by the billionaire corporate elite who want to rule the world in perpetuity by destroying upstart nations who have the temerity to climb the economic ladder their own way.
I’ve been waiting for any sign of this sea level rise for as long as activists have been going on about it. That’s more than twenty years! The places I visit are all sandy beaches or salt marshes, both very vulnerable to rising waters. Guess what. Not a sign!
Not all theory methinks Simon. And Laurence, to borrow a truism from another context: you may not be interested in stories of rising sea levels, but rising sea levels are interested in you…
https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/is-sea-level-rise-exaggerated-ocean-fact-check/#:~:text=Scientists%20have%20been%20tracking%20sea,a%20rise%20in%20sea%20level.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
I’ve seen this before. And much more.
As to the graph from NASA, it’s a bit dishonest. The extremely short time period makes the increase look quite large. In reality the rise is right in line with the rise that’s been going on for centuries now, long before the rise in CO2. The French port of Brest has records going back to 1807. Check out https://tidesandcurrents.NOAA.gov/sltrends/ ; hundreds of records from all around the West. We’ve been dealing with a rise of approx. 1ft/100years for a very long time. Why the sudden panic?
Even if I wasn’t interested in sea level rise I still wouldn’t like it when people try to pull the wool over my eyes.
Yes, the Maldivian atolls are doing very nicely thank you with huge investment on the Islands despite warnings they would be under water now.
These sea rise level claims come from models. Models are only ever as good as the assumptions built in to them. What we are seeing from sea rise levels so far is that the models are incorrect. The IPCC report AR6 WG1 reports a medium level confidence of some sea level rises by 2050. The extreme claims come from using a model called RCP8.5 which is an unlikely scenario well above where the world is headed.
Sea levels have risen 400 feet since the last glacial maximum around 28,000 years ago. Why is this last 3 foot of rise incontrovertibly down to man?
Hear Hear!
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/10/10/enough-is-enough/?highlight=go
All hail, the new colonialism! Who cares about poverty in Africa, when there’s some lovely virtue-signalling to be done? In the West, we adore what the Australian politician Paul Keating calls ‘the politics of the warm inner glow’.
These poor Africans, well, you can’t really expect them to understand climate change, can you? So we just have to give them a little pat on the head and do the thinking for them. They’ll thank us for it in the end.
Yeah, do they know it’s Christmas soon?
I would prefer them to be both poor and fewer in number if its better for the planet
It’s the richer countries that have the falling birth rates. There’s a lesson for you there if you’re willing to open your ears.
And who are we to call them impoverished if we are only using Western standards? They may feel very wealthy according to their own standards.
This is absolutely spot on. Glad to see the West’s patronising neo-colonialism being called out for exactly what it is. Some UK-based aid organisations such as Oxfam and Comic (sic) Relief spearhead this ideology, encouraging guilty westerners to give the gift of a goat (!) – because that’s what an African will be grateful for, after all. And the only power poor Africans should be allowed is the Oxfam-friendly kind: wind and solar, i.e. intermittent and unreliable, but that’ll do for those Africans. Meanwhile, ever pragmatic China continues to pursue enlightened self-interest and ignore these hand-wringing idiots by supporting projects that deliver useful, reliable energy.
The only idiots and ideologues in this conversation are the wishful thinkers who insist that business as usual is sustainable. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming, and the lack of seriousness on display here only strengthens the case for shutting down the global market for fossil fuels. Mudslinging won’t help Africa or stop rising sea levels.
OK, business as usual isn’t going to help. But a massive expansion of fossil-fuelled energy most certainly will help those with minimal access to energy and therefore condemned to poverty.
Not if their homeland becomes unliveable as a consequence of extreme heat or rising sea levels.
The evidence to the contrary is most certainly not overwhelming although media organisations will try to convince you it is. If you’d care to do serious unbiased research, scientists certainly are not unanimous in their support of the climate catastrophe rhetoric. Quite the opposite in fact as the cracks begin to appear in the current scientific narrative.
As usual, the “cracks” objection – that a very large (yes, overwhelming by any reasonable standard) majority view doesn’t amount to consensus – betrays a failure to understand or accept what constitutes scientific evidence: the most inclusive explanation of the available data. Your idea of “serious and unbiased” clearly differs from mine. (Hint: I’m not a Daily Mail reader.)
Resorting to insults during debate displays the lowest form of intellect.
Gallileo Gallilei refused to accept that he was wrong despite everyone doing their best, including by killing him, to convince him he was wrong.
He was right. The infantile argument “everyone agrees with me so there” has not won a debate in yonks, you need a new approach.
“business as usual” in the West has meant funnelling huge resources to inadequate wind and solar farms while trying to destroy the hydrocarbons industry. That will lead to worse outcomes than any climate apocalypse.
The resources currently invested in renewables are dwarfed by the subsidies, incentives and short termist political cowardice that keep the fossil industries in business. Redirect investment and hydrocarbon profits on the basis of polluter pays, and green economics wins hands down.
Please detail the subsidies given to hydrocarbons. Every time somebody posts a link to justify that claims it’s to some idea that anything less than 100% tax is arguably a subsidy. Or that energy price caps for domestic consumers are somehow a subsidy to producers. Meanwhile in the UK oil and gas companies pay a supertax on profits of 75% which has already led to cancellations of projects and thousands of job losses. Not to mention the vast compulsory and voluntary subsidies oil and gas companies invest in wind and solar. Or the legal obligation of power stations to take wind and solar generated power electricity before any other source. Very expensive for consumers as you may imagine, given the intermittency and unreliability of wind and solar.
It’s certainly true that a transition would/will be expensive but I think a gradualist approach is viable; more particularly, the cost need not be shouldered by the consumer. The various sources below indicate current financial flows and potential for redirection (and what should count as a subsidy). If some of these sources don’t usually make it onto your reading list, I hope you’ll give them a chance!
https://www.iisd.org/system/files/2023-03/global-stocktake-shifting-public-financial-flows.pdf
https://www.oecd.org/fossil-fuels/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/reforming-global-fossil-fuel-subsidies-how-the-united-states-can-restart-international-cooperation/
https://www.bbc.com/news/59233799
Subsidies – the never-ending fentanyl dependancy of the renewables industry.
The problem you have is Scientism – “the science is certain and we own the science” – science is never certain but contingent – if the facts change scientists change their minds – and should never depend on “authority” if what they see in their investigations leads them to alternative – provable – explanations.
But of course most of them “just follow the money” and toe the line – a state of moral turpitude and corruption.
To the detriment of us all-in so many nefarious cases.
I do not take my climate science advice from a $billionaire who flies about the world in private jets – while at the same time telling the biggest and Most brazen lies in all of history – to deny us a warm and well fed comfortable life – now that we know New York was not inundated by 39ft flooding in 2012 – research your own facts – own your own opinions and you WILL be truly happy
CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has risen from around 300 millionths to 420 millionths. When the dinosaurs were wiped out the concentration was 6,000 millionths. Are you sure CO2 is the culprit here and not changes in solar activity?
Very good and perceptive article which comes to exactly the right conclusions on the economic and moral imperative for Africa making full use of its reserves of fossil fuels.
Fazi is wrong, again. The problem is that they won’t use these reserves in a constructive manner. Corruption is a way of life in Africa, so where there is fossil fuels they will be sold and exported for cash, just in the same way as starving nations grow and export crops instead of feeding themselves.
This can’t happen with renewables.
Rather condescending, Robbie. And, of course, renewable energy can indeed be exported to the West.
Octopus Energy backs mega solar farm in Morocco to power 7 million heat pumps with cheap green power | Octopus Energy
Extraordinary, they are still exporting it however!
Does the World Bank have an estimate for when an Africa-wide EV recharging network will be in operation?
“the future”
This article presupposes that because Africans consume little energy, and because so many Africans are in poverty, the absence of energy must be the cause of the poverty.
This has it all backward: people consume little energy because they are poor.
They are not poor because of no fossil fuels but because of four things rarely discussed these days: 1. Incompetent governance, 2. Theft of resources by government and 3. Runaway population growth that puts downward pressure on wages and 4. The absence of education, which means that there is little value added by those who do work.
I can assure you that as someone who lives in Zimbabwe that I have never once heard anyone show any concern for net zero energy at all. Any shortages, where they exist, are not because of the Western Bogeyman but because the government have stolen the money that was supposed to be used to build new power stations and they’ve neglected and ruined the ones that still remain.
South Africa’s Eskom, likewise, has one of the dirtiest carbon footprints on the planet with 1kW of electricity producing 1kg of CO2. Do they ever talk about decarbonising it? Is South Africa’s energy woes down to net zero panic induced by pandering to Western climate activists?
No, it’s about the fact that Eskom has systematically fleeced South African tax payers of about 140 billion dollars since 2009, and built nothing with it. Nothing.
Pull the asparagus out of your ears Thomas.
Amen! Great to have you back, Hayden!
Thank you Chipoko, let’s see how long I last!
“Africa possesses vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. But extracting those resources and using them for domestic development requires money, infrastructure, expertise and institutional capacity — which Africa’s poorest nations, especially in the sub-Sahara, sadly lack. One solution is partnering with foreign energy companies — until recently, mostly European and American firms — but that means that much of the domestically produced gas and oil is then exported rather than used for local development.”
What is meant by “partnering with foreign energy companies”? How is this a solution? It seems to me a trite statement: all the more so for the follow-up point that about the oil being exported and not used for local development. Why should foreign energy companies partner with corrupt African entities (nations and businesses) in order to fund local energy needs? Africa itself needs to exploit it vast natural resources, which include the trillions upon trillions of dollars over decades of foreign aid, not to mention the trillions invested during the colonial era. But all that massive wealth has been plundered, squandered and squirrelled into overseas bank accounts by the continent’s Big Men, who’ve left the majority of their fellows to scratch a subsistence living from the earth beneath their feet. The huge population explosion in Africa (forecasts predict one billion people by the end of the 21st Century) is another disaster in that nobody anywhere, in Africa or the wider world, is acknowledging let alone addressing.
Africa’s own oil companies, and I have dealt with many, are hopelessly corrupt and incompetent. Especially the nationalised ones, which are the majority.
“This is a self-evident global truth. Europe and North America, the wealthiest regions on the planet, are also those with the highest per capita CO2 emissions”
How meaningful are such statistics? Maybe you find out that Lichtenstein is the state with the highest per capita emission.
Actually I have looked it up and the UK is about 60th for per capita usage.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/
ahead of China which is ahead on that statistics too.
And per capita emissions is not the only correlation.
The irony is that Africa is rich in renewable energy. The Grand Inga Dam on the River Congo should provide hydro power for almost the entire continent. Should. Problem is that Grand Inga is Africa’s equivalent of HS2. The reasons are different, but the delay’s the same.
I know many environmentalists. but not a single one that is in favour of dam-building. Many would rather do whatever they can to oppose and obstruct such projects.
The unasked question is “If Africa is so rich in natural resources why is it so poor and why are so many people living in poverty.”
I don’t mean today with the excuse of colonialism, I mean why did relatively resource poor Europe advance so spectacularly during the agricultural and industrial revolutions while Africa remained a backwater?
During the past 1000 years what has prevented Africans from developing their resources to become rich and successful?
Which of course is the reason why per capita emissions convey no information beyond, “they may be more productive per person. What you do with those emissions, eg provide commodities for other people or go on vacations, is of the import. Course, per capita allows governments to buy votes in populous districts, so it’s not going away soon. And yes, net zero is just as dangerous for “advanced” economies.
A century from now historians will weigh the depredations of colonialism practiced by European countries against the benevolent energy dictatorship now practiced by our wiser heads who know best how to provide energy to Africa.
I suspect a rudimentary accounting of the deaths attributable to 19th and early 20th Century imperialism will be dwarfed by the tens of millions of African citizens who already have, and in the near future will, perish from malnutrition, disease and the other scourges of poverty while those wiser heads withhold the very means to rescue them from their wholly avoidable fate.
Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin were just amateurs compared with this crowd.
So,in effect, if the Africans develop and empower themselves using gas, instead of the more problematic oil, especially considering the increases in general mechanical efficiency realized over the last hundred years, they will be far “greener” than the rest of us. Any wind or solar power they toss into the mix will just be frosting on the cake.
What a delicious irony!
Excellent article and I would like to particularly endorse the point that Western opposition to hydrocarbon development in Africa is an offence to reason and decency. All on its own it disqualifies any western diplomat or politician from any entitlement to be taken seriously.
If we in the West end up importing hydrocarbon or renewable energy from Africa we are going to be very lucky that we’re even able to do so, given the disgraceful dismissive arrogance we’ve displayed towards the wholly legitimate ambition of African nations to achieve the living standards we ourselves take for granted.
There is a sleight of hand that always goes with these discussions of who exactly is “really” emitting. They will say “but we have exported our emissions so we should include those of China as our own”. This misses a large part of the whole discussion.
Did China actively seek to increase its share of global manufacturing? Yes
Did China receive fair payment for that manufacturing? Yes
Has China become rich and used that money to alleviate poverty in its own country? Yes.
Is China a grown up country, able to feed, house and employ its people; Yes.
Is it able to answer for itself and its decisions? Yes.
Is China keeping a big list of self-loathing westerners that will be rewarded for putting the west down and infantilising everyone else? No, it really isn’t.
Further proof of the proposition that ”decarbonising” the economy will not happen by diktat but only by innovation leading to green technologies that are cheaper than their fossil fuel equivalents e.g. solar power has dropped in cost by 95%+ and now undercuts coal, oil and gas. It only makes sense of course if energy can be stored but fortunately lithium ion batteries have also dropped by 95%+ and other innovations suggest further falls are likely. Even in those sectors where these breakthroughs have yet to be commercialised e.g. air travel, cement or transmission promising innovations encourage long term confidence.
Africa will switch away from fossil fuels when the economics are attractive not because they are coerced or preached at.
The surprising hero of this story is George W Bush who argued for an innovation based approach twenty years ago. Those who have been proven wrong were the activists who argued for a crusade against consumption, cars, meat etc since technological solutions were unproven and improbable.
Let us be green but not dumb green.
We look forward to these massive savings from 95% cheaper solar and batteries filtering through to our domestic bill. So far they have been illusory.
Or is it that the remaining 5% is still too expensive?
Nuclear energy is not ‘fully carbon free.’ A common misconception- the operating phase of a reactor might be (might…), but a full life cycle analysis will show that getting the fuel out of of the ground will make a nuclear reactor less carbon-efficient than a natural gas plant, and that’s before you DCO sided the carbon load of pouring the concrete for the beast itself, and the virtually unknown impact of decommissioning and making the ‘spent’ fuel safe.
You might want to build one anyway, but nuclear reactors are not carbon free over their lifecycle, nor do they run uninterruptedly to produce ‘baseload’ energy.
Neither are wind (steel , concrete and transmission infrastructure) and solar ( smelting quartz ) ….
And the use of at least 6 18-wheel, diesel burning tractor trailers to deliver the 3 massive blades and huge pole sections to each and every installation across the land.
Indeed, plus the carbon cost of shipping those blades and poles halfway round the planet.
Quite right! Nor did I make that claim.
This is wrong. Once the production of electricity from nuclear ( fission or fusion) becomes self sustaining it becomes carbon neutral.
So you don’t believe in “cradle to grave” analysis? If so, then you would most likely have no issue with using a diesel powered electric generation station to charge automobiles, which is complete insanity.
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/09/30/largest-ev-charging-station-in-the-world-uses-diesel-powered-generators/
I believe most of the early Teslas were in fact coal-fired rather than diesel-powered, but things have moved on…
And your drink in the bar this evening is free. After you’ve paid for it.
Oops – ‘DCO sided’ was typed as ‘consider’, but my correcting edit didn’t take.
Can you link me to some data to support your assertion please? If you can’t – then don’t waste our time by posting nonsense.
Your argument is intellectually dishonest if presented as a defence for renewables because renewables also present a very large CO2 emissions cost as part of their construction, maintenance and decommissioning.
As for the mining costs, I would like to see some proof that this is so large as to reduce the emissions efficiency of nuclear to below natural gas on a lifecycle basis. I simply do not believe this. I accept that in a mixed-source energy system the mining and processing of fissile reactor feedstocks will emit CO2 simply because most of our energy presently still comes from hydrocarbons. But the context of this debate is the replacement of hydrocarbon energy with alternatives, and nuclear energy has the capacity to do this at a much faster rate than renewable energy does (which is effectively never, in my opinion).
Inhuman ideology? You’ve surpassed yourself this time Fazi.
I’ve said it many times, economic protectionism will be our undoing in this matter.
Then stop protecting inefficient renewables
I’m an advocate of nuclear energy, but we still need renewables on a large scale for a balanced portfolio.
I disagree. Given the enormous scale of development in nuclear energy required to actually displace hydrocarbons, it would be better to just go full-on nuclear.