A report titled ‘African Energy Leadership: The Case for 100% Renewable Energy’ was published last week, claiming that “Africa could save between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by transitioning to a fully renewable energy system by 2050”. This shift, it asserted, would also create up to 5.4 million new energy sector jobs, significantly more than the 3.2 million jobs projected “under current fossil fuel trajectories”. This report by the environmental NGO (ENGO) Power Shift Africa in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures (UTS-ISF) was launched at the Bonn Climate Conference (SB62).
In recent years, the concept of “leapfrogging” over fossil fuel development to craft a 100 % renewable energy system in Africa has gained traction: bypass oil, gas and coal, build “clean” solar and wind farms instead and align with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 °C global warming target. Proponents point to “dramatic cost reductions” in solar and wind, enormous “theoretical potential” and massive economic benefits with “millions of new green jobs”.
And yet for all these glossy numbers, the physics, economics and on-the-ground realities tell a far more sobering story. The leapfrog narrative is less a roadmap to prosperity than a vapid fig leaf for Western moral satisfaction, an exercise in a hypocritical carbon colonialism.
Leapfrogging is an Empty Notion
The concept of Africa leapfrogging to a 100% renewable energy system, bypassing conventional fossil fuels, defies the fundamental constraints of physics and economics. This has been incisively outlined by Mark
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I agree 100%; the hypocrisy of the climate virtue signallers is beyond belief, effectively telling the poorest countries to stop developing before they catch up. I wouldnt be surprised, though, if the AGN were gaming the system, using it to squeeze money from the west…and good on them if they are!
If the AGN were doing that, they wouldn’t be helping themselves. Money isn’t much use, if there’s nothing useful to buy.
The late African activist, Fiona Kobusingye, eloquently summarized in 2009 why cheap and constantly available electricity is a necessity of life:
Life in Africa is often nasty, impoverished and short. AIDS kills 2.2 million Africans every year, say WHO reports. Lung infections cause 1.4 million deaths, malaria 1 million more, intestinal diseases 700,000. Diseases that could be prevented with simple vaccines kill an additional 600,000 annually, while war, malnutrition and life in filthy slums send countless more parents and children to early graves.
And yet, day after day, Africans are told the biggest threat we face is – global warming.
Conferences, news stories, television programs, class lectures and one-sided “dialogues” repeat the claim endlessly. We’re told using oil and petrol, even burning wood and charcoal, will dangerously overheat our planet, melt ice caps, flood coastal cities, and cause storms, droughts, disease and extinctions.
Over 700 climate scientists and 31,000 other scientists say humans and plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide have minimal effects on Earth’s temperature and climate, and there is no global warming crisis. But their views and studies are never invited or even tolerated in these “climate crisis” forums, especially at “ministerial dialogues” staged with United Nations money. Al Gore refuses to debate any of these experts,… Read more »
“Save money”, “create jobs’… Hmm, those sound like familiar phrases, but I can’t quite place them….
Jobs costs a Business money, hard cash, and management time.
It’s why automation is so attractive.
As we saw in Martin Durkin’s film “The Great Global Warming Swindle” in 2007, there is someone keen to destroy the African Dream, and their dream is to develop. Except it isn’t just someone, it is the whole technocratic UN/WEF establishment who seek to control all of the worlds wealth and resources and keeping poor Africans poor is on the agenda. If you tell these people they cannot have fossil fuels, what you are really telling them is that they won’t have much electricity, and currently many in the third world don’t have it already, and will be lucky to have enough to power a fridge.
And, in the West, a fridge is indispensable, well, at the moment: it’s a means of not wasting food.
In fact, a fridge is indispensable, especially in hot climates.
The secret is to insert a supposedly necessary step zero, before the expected step one, that precipitates the mindset of Central Control, manned by the uneducated PPE graduates, like Ed M, leaving prosperity out of reach. It’s just the African version of NET Zero policies. Or are the NET Zero policies the Western version of the Great African Swindle?