#WTH Neocolonialist environmentalism
Yeah, it's a thing, as the West imposes "green" requirements on Africa
Three things from our pod with former deputy assistant Secretary of State and current Executive Director of the Energy for Growth Hub, Todd Moss this week:
Carbons fueled the growth of Europe and the U.S. Now that we’re rich, we want to be sure it doesn’t fuel anyone else’s growth.
Because of the West’s “strings attached” environmental militancy, China is stepping in and making deals all over Africa.
U.S. law is clear: The environment should be a factor in aid to Africa. But the U.S. Emperor of Environmentalism, John Kerry, has made it the only factor.
Despite the fact that your podcasters do their best to highlight the stunning hypocrisy and perennial ineffectiveness of Biden climate czar John Kerry (“Why thank you, I would like to take a private jet to go to a wedding in Jordan. Taxpayer funded? Naturellement.”), the pod has not focused extensively on environmental foreign policy. Or as our guest has called it, “neocolonialist conspiracy.” This week, we right that wrong.
So, right now, the world’s greatest polluters are China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Iran etc etc. If you didn’t notice vast clouds of dirty smoke coming from the African continent, well, your eyes are working. But we in the list above are all bad, bad countries, using bad, bad fossil fuels. Sure, fossil fuels helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, but the African continent is not allowed this same industrial jump start.
The phrase “not allowed” is key here — the power structure of global finance dictates that borrowers (African countries, among others) from the World Bank, the IMF (headed by Western countries) submit to whatever conditions the institutions impose. The conditions that the United States has chosen to elevate? Renewable energy. Why? Not because it has the borrowers’ best interests in mind, nor because the Biden administration is concerned about alleviating real poverty.
Apparently, Washington’s wise leaders want Africa to remain poor, because that way, the planet will be greener. Nevermind that Africa contributes a minuscule percentage to climate problems. They’re still going to be part of the solution, because we of the enlightened West say so.
We know you here in America want your AC and your fridge and your car and your phone and your stuff. But should Africans have those things? No! They should have “carbon-free” projects (says USAID). They should have clean energy!! (Also USAID)
Now, sarcasm aside, there’s nothing wrong with supporting clean energy or green-ness or solar. But if Europe and the United States tie their assistance to African nations using only those forms of energy, well, African nations will turn elsewhere. And they have. China is scooping up projects and financing all over the continent. US programs like Power Africa are largely moribund, because the U.S. government can’t figure out how to package financing and projects and sales, because… ooh look, a wedding in Jordan!
Apologies, it’s hard not to be outraged and scornful about the offensive and racist idea that Africa should remain poor, dependent on clean energy that can’t power the continent into the future… But that is, in effect, U.S. policy.
HIGHLIGHTS
So… a “neocolonialist conspiracy to keep Africa poor?”
TM: I think the big picture is that the global energy transition is happening and most people think of the global energy transition as about being the US, Europe and other rich countries moving from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources. And that's all true. But the other big global energy transition, what's even more important is what's happening in Africa, Asia, Middle East, where countries are building a tremendous amount of energy infrastructure to meet their needs, to create industries, to power economic growth, and especially for jobs.
And so we look out at say, out to 2050 and 90% of the additional electricity that the global economy is going to need in 2050, it's outside high income countries. It's in the emerging and middle income and lower income countries. So that's the big story. And the US really needs to play a leadership role for economic reasons, for national security reasons, for climate reasons, to help make sure that that transition happens and that it happens as fast as possible because people are going to need energy and we don't want to just feed that space to our strategic competitors.
That doesn’t sound like a “neocolonialist conspiracy” — your words?
TM: I think the big problem, what I've been writing about is that while we're trying to push renewable energy and renewable energy is going to play a big part in our energy future, and in the future of four countries, pushing renewables does not mean we only push renewables. And what's happened is there's been, in my view, a very worrying trend where the ways that we finance global infrastructure are being pushed into two different tiers. So for the rich countries, we can do whatever we need to do for our own energy security. But poor countries, particularly in Africa, they are reliant on a set of global institutions that can provide concessional finance to build infrastructure. And those financing mechanisms are increasingly under the pressure of Europeans and American policymakers to go renewables only. Now, that's not technically the US policy. There is a little bit of nuance there, but the way it's been interpreted is that if the US is going to encourage building power plants overseas, we want them to only be green. And that's completely unfair, unjust. And that's not what we're doing in our own country.
Countries are exporting gas to richer countries, but if they want to build downstream power plants and local industry that would use those same fossil fuels, they are being told no, don't do that for the reasons of climate.
That's pretty much the definition of neocolonialism.
TM: Well, it is. It's also the power structure of global finance because who are the borrowers from these institutions that are reliant are asking the Germans and the Americans and the French for financing assistance and they try to put these conditions on them. And we just decided in the West that we're going to live with that hypocrisy, which is very frustrating obviously for Africans and has a lot of diplomatic blow back. The US is seen as often patronizing and sanctimonious. And that has impacts on lots of other things like Africa's opposition, vis-a-vis the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So I do think we need to be a lot more nuanced. We need to think that all countries put energy security first. They all want to play a role in climate change, but we shouldn't expect the poorest countries to do more than we're willing to do ourselves.
Aren’t we making a geostrategic mistake, and providing openings to, say, China?
TM: If you're an African leader, you love having multiple options. So it's great that you're not entirely beholden to Western institutions, especially given the difficulty in getting financing for fossil fuel infrastructure. The main attraction from Chinese finance is that they come with package deals. So the Chinese will come, let's say they will build not just a power plant, but they will build the transmission line, they will build the gas pipeline, they'll even build the downstream mining or industrial zone that would provide the anchor customer to help finance that structure. And it all comes wrapped in a nice bow of state finance. Now the challenge for the United States is we don't do that. We're a la carte investors. So if an American power developer wants to build a power plant, they want nothing to do with the fuel or the mining or even the transmission line.
And so it puts a bigger onus on the host government to put that package together. And that's one of the big things that's frustrating I think from a US policy perspective is that we already have many of the tools we need to put together some reasonable packages that could be a credible alternative to Chinese or Russian investment. But the US interagency is so broken and dysfunctional that we're not actually organized to use these tools together.
Why can't the US get its act together to compete with the Chinese?
TM: In the power sector right now, if you were going to sign a power deal, those contracts would be kept secret. And the terms of those contracts are secret, even though there's almost always a public guarantee on the back end. The United States could play a much more important role in helping to create transparency standards around contracting, much as exist in today in mining and the oil and gas sector where contracts, because there's such a strong public interest, there's a lot of transparency around what governments are signing on behalf of their people.
That doesn't exist today in the power sector. So if you are GE and you're trying to sign a deal with a country to build a power plant, you have no idea if they've already signed five other similar projects at what price with a Chinese developer. But if the US could work with its allies to help create disclosure norms, we could help raise the governance standards in the entire sector. And by the way, that would help scale clean energy markets much, much faster than we're seeing today.
What’s happened to Power Africa?
TM: So Power Africa was launched, we just hit the 10-year anniversary. It's actually a terrific program. I've been a big fan of Power Africa. And the idea is that it's supposed to find projects that are close to get reaching financial close, but that just need a little nudge to get over the final hurdle. And so far, that program has contributed toward 14,000 megawatts of new power plants, which is fantastic. And the issue with Power Africa is that it was built to solve a problem from 10 years ago, which was that there were lots of projects that were almost ready but not quite ready. And Power Africa did a good job of getting them ready.
The problem today is very different, which is the pipeline is empty. And power Africa right now, it's not built for solving that problem. It needs to do a lot more in project development and systems planning and all of the other pieces that are holding back a lot of energy investments. And I do think this administration has gone too far in pushing essentially renewables only. That is not the law. The law actually explicitly says an all of the above approach. But there was guidance sent out to all embassies not long ago, which actually created a lot of confusion. It said there are some exceptions, but it was interpreted by the bureaucracy to mean we're not going to do fossil fuel projects. And that's been reinforced by some of Secretary Kerry's rhetoric.
How did the pipeline go dry?
TM: Part of it is that during COVID, a lot of projects fell apart. A lot of it has to do with the global economic environment. But it gets back to my point earlier, which is we did not invest in building a pipeline of projects to have... to push a dozen projects through the pipeline, you've got to develop many dozens of projects because not all of them are going to come to fruition. And what Power Africa did is it picked the low hanging fruit that was sitting there, but did not help grow the next generation of projects. And that's really where we are today.
But aren’t developing countries going to be the source of emissions in the future?
TM: Well, South Africa is a coal economy and they are a meaningful emitter. But they're a complete outlier. There is not another country in Africa, not one that has any meaningful impact on global emissions. So Africa is just not the problem. Today, Nigeria, which is an oil and gas producer — an average American emits 33 times as much carbon dioxide as the average Nigerian. So Africa's not the problem and Africa will not be the problem because there is, as you're suggesting, no plausible scenario where Africa's emissions matter to the global carbon budget.
It's just scaremongering to claim otherwise. But what we've seen is that it's really difficult to curb emissions in your own country. It's much easier to change the financing rules for poor countries on the other side of the planet. And that is green colonialism that we talked about earlier
So, Europeans and Americans don’t want to fuel Africa’s growth with coal (as we fueled ours)?
TM: The issue is, other than South Africa, coal is basically irrelevant. So people worry either who are pro coal or who are scared to death of coal, coal is irrelevant in Africa. Actually on our website, we've got something we call the African Coal Death Watch, which we track every potential coal project that could be built in Africa. And the headline is, there aren't any. So coal is not the issue. The issue is, as you suggest Marc, how do we get people the cheapest, most reliable electricity as fast as possible so they can not only have lights at home but build industry. One of the most promising sectors in Africa is they've got tons of educated young people who cannot find jobs. The potential in the digital economy is just massive. Look at Nigerian creative industries, music, film, it's just taking off because there's so much talent that's being held back by lack of, among other things, electricity.
Read the whole transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
What’s happening with USG support for African power plants? These 5 charts explain. (Todd Moss, Jacob Kincer, and Katie Auth, Energy for Growth Hub, April 27 2023)
Europe to Africa: Gas for Me but Not for Thee (W. Gyude Moore and Todd Moss, Foreign Policy, July 14 2022)
“We can’t afford for everyone to live our lifestyles” (June 9 2023)
Where is US support for Africa’s power plants? The data says… meh. (April 9 2023)
Africa will remain poor unless it uses more energy (The Economist, Nov. 3 2022)
Africa might leapfrog straight to cheap renewable electricity minigrids (The Economist, Nov. 10 2017)
Beijing and Washington Are Battling Over Africa’s Green Future (Theophile Pouget-Abadia and Rachel Rizzo, Foreign Policy, May 23 2023)
Why China Is Investing in Africa’s Green Energy Future (Kate Bartlett, VOA, May 3 2023)
China holds upper hand in battle with U.S. for Africa’s energy (Robert Bociaga, Nikkei Asia, April 19 2023)