The paradox is stark: to rein in severe climate change, the United States and Europe lead a global campaign against fossil fuel and greenhouse gas. Yet, in that twin-bracket may lay Africa’s path to cheap, sustainable energy.
Meanwhile, the WENA (Western Europe and North America) neo-climate crusaders have been the most reckless in the carbon poisoning of the globe. Africa has been the least contributor to that plague. So, the solution to this dire challenge must be balanced and equitable, if it’s not to land Africa in fresh — and serious — energy trouble.
That was the long-and-short of President Muhammadu Buhari’s well publicized address to the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, officially tagged Conference of the Parties 26 (COP26) at Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
COP26 opened on November 1 with rhetoric matching the current environmental doomsday. Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general, couldn’t have been starker: “Either we stop it,” he told the more than 120-nation delegations gathered, “or it stops us.”
Boris Johnson, British prime minister, went historic: pollution started right there, near Glasgow, home to one of the first Industrial Revolution-era factories. That perhaps sent English romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats tingling in their graves with “we told you so!” This genre of poetry decried and attacked pristine industrial poisoning of the environment.
Joe Biden, the US president, assumed a moral high ground in his environmental bully pulpit of fellow heads of government: “Will we do what is necessary?” he queried. “This is the decade that will determine the answer.”
But even as the environmental Armageddon drama played out, China the globe’s current No. 1 emitter of carbon, mainly via coal, was absent. But India, the fourth emitter after China, the United States and the European Union (EU), was there; and made a net-zero carbon pledge by 2070.
But the approach to carbon elimination is no way unanimous. Indeed, there seems a dissonance between the industrialized WENA, China pumping out carbon at the zenith of own industrial power and much of Africa, which lot has been de-industrialization. It’s all along the one global problem but varied local solutions, which President Buhari canvassed in his Glasgow speech.
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Why – China might ask and it appears asking -should she keep off coal, the same energy WENA earlier used to power its industries to reap tremendous global wealth, just because WENA now says so?
A similar question President Buhari asked on behalf of African countries: why should the current attempts to de-emit carbon and curb global warming, though plausible, lead to sure future crisis for Nigeria and others, whose future industrial development still depends on cheap hydrocarbon?
These are critical questions world leaders need to seriously address, if they hope to cobble together a workable consensus needed to yet save the world from own carbon-industrial appetite.
COP’s target is to freeze the earth’s temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius: the global warming of the pristine industrial era (1850-1900). Between 2006 and 2015, that has flared to 2.5 degrees Celsius or worse, hitting 2.7C right now; and leading to rising ocean beds, harsh and erratic weather, terrible droughts, wild fires and increased desertification. America and the EU believe global cooling can be achieved by shunning coal, fossil fuel and gas.
But the developing countries of Africa demur on this “green bullet,” claiming fossil fuel was the fastest and surest path to power own economies into global reckoning. In some especially euphonic lines, Buhari warned in his Glasgow speech: “… In our global rush for electric cars, we risk replacing the last century’s scramble for fossil fuel with a new global race in lithium for batteries … We run the risk,” the president further warned, “of trying to fix the climate change crisis with an energy crisis.”
Fortunately, there are useful proposals, mainly on funding technologies to make fossil fuels “greener,” thus spewing far less carbon. This will re-route fossil gas to power electric plants instead of belching the noxious stuff into open air. It will also build mini-hydro power plants which are no threat to the marine eco-system. Lastly it will explore nuclear energy which, though not renewable, is carbon-neutral.
According to a finding by Carbon Tracker, an oil and gas think-tank, oil producing countries risk losing around US$ 13 trillion by 2040, no thanks to progressive disinvestment in oil and gas. That would be losing N40 from every N100 those governments gross today. ”Green bullet” could be green progress for America and EU. But it could also be yellow peril too for much of African and Asian countries.
On the other hand, there is a yearly US$ 100 billion pledged war chest to help carbon-driven economies transition to the new green era. If the bulk of this amount — hardly enough to start with — is spent on carbon-reduction technologies without risking the survival of developing economies, the world would have cobbled a consensus to checkmate global warming. In essence, the undeveloped world must keep vigil against environmental imperialism.