“The Global South is growing resentful of climate hypocrisy” By Eduardo Porter
“Self-serving energy policies cloaked in high-minded rhetoric are hurting the world’s poor.”
The Global South is growing resentful of climate hypocrisy
Self-serving energy policies cloaked in high-minded rhetoric are hurting the world’s poor.
5 min
One of the bedrock principles that emerged to guide the world’s battle against climate change at the United Nations’ Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro way back in June 1992 was that affluent nations would provide much of the financing and technology for less-developed countries. The rich would help the poor rise to the climate challenge without sacrificing their path toward economic development — a path that would undoubtedly require a lot of energy.
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In the three-plus decades since, there have been 29 global climate summits to discuss strategies. Rich countries have announced grand multibillion-dollar commitments to help poor countries transition to clean energy and adapt to climate change.
So how are we doing? The good news, as it were, is that poor countries still emit few greenhouse gases. The 26 countries classified as low income by the World Bank account for only 3.5 percent of global emissions, up from 3.4 percent in 1992. The 51 lower-middle-income countries account for a further 16 percent.
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This “achievement,” however, has come at an enormous cost to these countries’ development aspirations. Consider Nigeria. In 1992, when the environmental crowd gathered in Rio, each Nigerian consumed 2,299 kilowatt-hours (kWh) worth of energy per year on average. By the 25th U.N. climate summit in 2019, Nigeria’s energy consumption per personhad risen to … 2,453 kWh. That is about 3 percent of the 76,634 kWh consumed by the average American — enough to power maybe three or four of those big GE fridges Americans install in their kitchens.
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Energy consumption per capita in Bangladesh is not much higher: 2,712 kWh in 2021. That year, it was 4,630 kWh in Pakistan, 6,992 kWh in India and 8,432 kWh in Indonesia. These four countries plus Nigeria account for nearly 30 percent of the world’s population yet only 13 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Their leaders are not wrong to think that the United Nations-sponsored strategy to combat climate change over the past three decades has relied largely on curbing their access to energy and curtailing their path to progress.
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It’s not merely that rich nations are ignoring the plight of the planet’s poor and failing to provide promised money. As noted by the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus and Vijaya Ramachandran, the situation is much worse than that: Affluent nations are actively working to curtail poor countries’ access to energy, starving them of needed financing for projects involving fossil fuels.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Oil and gas production in the United States is reaching all-time highs. Britain is busy issuing licenses to exploit an enormous new oil field in the North Sea. And yet still these countries are pushing to end financing for fossil fuel projects overseas. Just as Norway rakes in billions of krone from natural gas exports, it is also part of a group that has been lobbying the World Bank to stop financing of all natural gas projects in Africa.
And what about the large-scale financing promised by the world’s affluent nations to the world’s poor? Critics have noticed that it has come at the expense of financing for other development projects with proven track records.
The rich north’s energy agenda is misguided not only because it is ethically bankrupt. It is also failing to curb greenhouse gas emissions. To the extent it continues to rely on repressing development in the poorest corners of the world — in countries with the fastest-growing populations — it will guarantee failure well into the future. When the World Bank asked countries in sub-Saharan African about their priorities last year, respondents in 18 nations put climate in 11th place — after education, agriculture and food security, water supply and sanitation infrastructure, health, and job creation. Still, the bank has committed 45 percent of its lending for fiscal 2025 to climate.
Less-developed nations’ most urgent goals are to industrialize, increase agricultural productivity, and build housing and transportation infrastructure. These goals will be hard to attain on the back of energy from the wind and the sun, sources that produce intermittent power that requires complex transmission and distribution systems, along with extra storage capabilities. Reaching their goals, in fact, requires access to easy, cheap energy. That is mostly natural gas. This is a fact the rich nations of the north are trying hard to…..