The West's war on energy is crippling Africa
Roughly a
half century ago, rising energy prices devastated Western economies, helping
make the autocrats of the Middle East insanely rich while propping up the slowly
disintegrating Soviet empire. Today the world is again reeling from soaring
energy prices; but this time the wound is self-inflicted — a product of
misguided policies meant to accelerate the transition to green energy.
For the
political and academic clerisy, the energy “reset” is like manna from heaven.
It gives them a licence to impose the kind of “technocratic social engineering”
that makes poor people poorer while stripping away working-class aspirations, as we already see in
places like California and Germany. In Spain, 10% of all households cannot
adequately heat their homes during the winter months; and in Italy, electricity
bills jumped by 55% by
January 2022. In the United Kingdom the
number of homes that cannot pay their energy bills is set to triple by April
2022.
The new
regime of expensive, often intermittent energy also threatens to make permanent
the poverty of the developing world, which already suffers from a lack of cheap
and reliable energy. The fossil fuels now being targeted by Western
policymakers and financial firms like Blackrock are
critical for industrialisation, and it is unlikely they can be replaced by wind
and solar alone: fossil fuels still account for 81% of all energy supplies,
and even if every country meets their climate promises, they will still account
for roughly three quarters in 2040.
It’s
hardly surprising, then, that in Africa there is a growing scepticism toward
Western policies of “sustainability” — even though these policies, draped in
the language of socially conscious “stakeholder capitalism”, pledge to address
“systemic racism”. Already
in 2015, for example, the president of the African Developmental Bank stated
that “Africa cannot function because we have no power” and affirmed the
continent’s need for “renewable and conventional” energy, including “natural
gas and coal”.
Similarly,
in the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference last year, Nigerian President
Muhammadu Buhari warned that the
climate policies favoured by Western governments investors and aid agencies
could lead to an Africa-wide energy crisis. Just last month, the president of
Senegal made it clear ahead of the EU-African Union
summit that Africans are not prepared to pay for Europe’s carbon levy. South
Africa’s Energy Minister, meanwhile, criticised NGOs and
universities that promote “climate-driven solutions” with money from European
think tanks.
And
African leaders have every reason to be concerned about the dangers of
expensive energy. Fuel riots have occurred in the recent past in Senegal, Malawi, South Africa, and Nigeria, while energy costs
were a catalyst for the Arab Spring, when a spike in oil prices drove up the price of grain. Earlier
this year in Kazakhstan, soaring energy prices nearly sparked a revolution.
Given
that more than half of all
Africans live in energy poverty, perhaps their politicians have every right to
be worried. Even relatively advanced South Africa no longer
produces adequate and reliable electricity and now faces opposition to
developing its own fossil fuel and nuclear capacity. The resulting crisis — the
country’s manufacturers are closing shop in the
face of high electricity prices, leaving two-thirds of young adults are out of work — is threatening the stability
of South Africa’s democracy.
In the
rest of Africa, meanwhile, in population centres such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, energy supplies are woefully inadequate
to meet daily needs. Without more reliable energy supplies, the continent will
remain mired in poverty — and civil strife is bound to follow.
No doubt
aware of this, some governments, such as those in Senegal and Ethiopia, have set
ambitious targets for full electrification by 2025. Similar plans are underway
across the continent, with the African Developmental Bank promising
to help finance electrification by 2030. How likely that is to work remain
unclear. It’s striking, though, that while Africa cripples itself in pursuit of
eco-friendly energy, Western-backed environmental activists are protesting offshore
gas exploration in South Africa’s poverty stricken Wild Coast region.
Contrast
what is being recommended for the developing world with the behaviour of the
United States and a tale of hypocrisy slowly comes into focus. Thanks in part
to the rise of fracking, the US is slated to become the world’s largest producer of
liquified natural gas. This growth in the American energy supply has coincided
with falling greenhouse gas emissions, largely driven not by environmental
regulations but by the replacement of coal with natural gas.
The
natural gas boom has been particularly important for those who have suffered
from the loss of manufacturing, driving an industrial renaissance in
economically hard-hit regions such as the Midwest as well as historically poor
parts of the South. Low natural gas prices, notes the Cleveland Fed, have
been critical to the manufacturing job growth now
transforming large parts of the nation’s heartland. By contrast, green policies
have driven high prices in states like California, harming the once thriving industrial
economy and driving up the cost of basic necessities like
electricity.
It seems
odd, then, that President Joe Biden and most Democrats are insistent on
ignoring these lessons. Biden and most of his party favour utilising the Federal Reserve and other executive
departments to enforce “net zero” policies. Everything from gas pipelines to new leases for offshore oil are
being cancelled, while new regulations are
making it harder to build new fossil fuel plants. The green-dominated media,
meanwhile, is trying to blame energy shortages on climate change and
the hated fossil fuel companies.
These
policies, both in the US and the rest of the world, are the product of the view
that anthropogenic global warming is as an existential threat to life on Earth
rather than a long-term nuisance that will have to be managed gradually
via adaptation, particularly in
light of China and India’s continued fossil fuel growth. To the extent the
apocalyptic as opposed to pragmatic view is adopted, the policy agenda moves
towards “de-growth”, which
seeks to reduce consumption, effectively lowering the living standards of the
masses to “save the planet”. This may seem a small price to pay for affluent
people in Europe and America, but one doubts that the governments of the
developing world will be willing to tell their poor that environmental piety
matters more than basic survival.
Does this
mean that we’re doomed to an eco-apocalypse? Not necessarily; it is possible to
gradually decarbonise the developing world without hamstringing its economies.
On the nuclear front, for instance, there is currently talk of Small Modular Reactors (SMR),
which are theoretically smaller and easier to build than existing reactors. But
even proponents admit these technologies will take significant investments and
a few decades to mature. Some
suggest that lithium batteries will allow us to make renewables more viable by
vastly improving grid storage technology, but these batteries require enormous
amounts of rare earth minerals.
Perhaps
the most promising technology is geothermal energy. Thanks to the advances in
deep drilling technology from hydraulic fracking, two pilot projects are in
progress in Serbia and Canada that might
allow for the heat of the deep hot biosphere to be exploited at an affordable
cost.
But as
the Africans recognise, in the short run we are left with a choice between a
net-zero regime based on expensive solar and wind power and
one relying on the only energy sources we know are cheap and reliable — fossil
fuels. Coal, nuclear power and
especially natural gas are here
to stay; the imperatives of Greta Thunberg won’t be adopted by people in the
slums of Africa’s cities or rural Chinese looking to share in their country’s
prosperity. Outside of the talking shops, in the real world, net zero remains a
distant prospect. But the mounting energy crisis is already here — and
sacrificing the world’s poorest countries, and many in the West as well, in
pursuit of a green agenda won’t make it disappear.
Green hypocrisy hurts the poorest - UnHerd
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