By Robert Bradley Jr. — December 13, 2023
Ed note: As COP28 wound down, the African Energy Chamber issued this communication.
“African producers have not and will not agree to phasing out fossil fuels. Unlike the rest of the developed world, the continent has not yet had the chance to transform its economies through oil and gas. In order to develop, grow and address concerns such as energy poverty and industrialization, oil and gas will need to remain central for years to come.”
Oil and gas will play an instrumental role in Africa’s economy for decades to come, and as such, African producers will not agree to any phase-out of these resources.
Despite the fact that over 600 million people are still without access to electricity and over 900 million people lack access to clean cooking in Africa, the continent’s COP 28 negotiators are caving into pressure from the West, stating that Africa is open to a phase-out approach regarding fossil fuels. The African Energy Chamber (AEC), as the voice of the African energy sector, clarifies that this is not true. African producers – both established and emerging – are not willing to forfeit these previous resources for a global agenda, and their negotiators should not sell out the hopes and aspirations of Africa.
The African Group of Negotiators, established at COP 1 in Berlin, was created as an alliance of African member states to represent the interests of the region in international climate change negotiations. As a technical body that engages in discussions during COP, the group has an obligation to reflect the needs and objectives of the continent. However, what this COP is showing us, is that this group is not averse to pressures from the west. Rather, the group is promoting the idea that Africa is willing and open to phasing out fossil fuels.
Chaired by Ephraim Mwepya Shitima from the Republic of Zambia, the Group, while opposing a phase-out, has claimed that the continent would be prepared for a phase-down approach. This would entail the utilization of oil and gas in line with national development agendas, and thereafter a gradual phase-out. But this leaves Africa where? Argus Media reports that Nigeria’s Environment Minister Isiaq Adekunle Salako stated that the phasing down of fossil fuels was inevitable and that Nigeria is prepared to back a just and orderly approach. Similarly, Argus reports that Uganda’s Minister of Energy Ruth Nankabirwa would also only support a phase-down approach.
Rather than fight for the lesser of two evils, why not defend the continent’s right to keep oil and gas in its energy mix long-term? Why not promote economic development, defend the rights of the continent’s population and commit to an industrialized and energy secure future in Africa? Choosing a phase-down rather than a phase-out simply delays the inevitable: that Africa will one day be forced to give up its lifeline to oil and gas.
“African negotiators need to stop lying and misinforming. African producers have not agreed to, neither are they open to, phasing out fossil fuels. Negotiators need to be careful and remember who they are fighting for. Don’t let empty promises about technology and money cloud your judgement. This is not the time for Africa to fall into the trap of conforming to biased agendas. Don’t sell out – oil and gas will remain in Africa,” stated NJ Ayuk, Executive Chairman of the AEC.
Oil and gas will be the backbone of Africa’s economic growth. Looking at countries such as Angola, Libya and Nigeria – some of the biggest oil producers on the continent – phasing down or out will essentially remove the lifeline of these economies, leaving people in the dark. In Mozambique, Uganda, Namibia and Senegal, where large-scale projects are set to come online in the coming years, oil – and more specifically natural gas – is of crucial importance. Gas provides a clean energy alternative that will power industry, households and development. The resources will generate revenue, expand infrastructure while upskilling the local workforce. Through gas, countries in Africa will be able to not only develop but thrive.
However, if these very countries are required to phase-down, their chances of reaching their full economic potential will be significantly reduced. Broken promises of technology and capital have not gone anywhere. Going forward, these same promises being directed towards the African negotiators will meet the same fate.
“African producers have not and will not agree to phasing out fossil fuels. Unlike the rest of the developed world, the continent has not yet had the chance to transform its economies through oil and gas. In order to develop, grow and address concerns such as energy poverty and industrialization, oil and gas will need to remain central for years to come,” Ayuk concluded.
Size of Africa –
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Glad that map left out Canada and Australia.
Not just because there wasn’t any room left on that stage, but because since their combined emissions amount to less than ~ 3% of the world’s total, neither of them has any real involvement in the whole climate “change / emergency / crisis / collapse / tyranny” whatever.
The fact that their governments keep pretending they have a contribution to this topic is delusional, relevance-deprivation syndrome writ large.
That’s a nice map. Just a note, Alaska is about the size of the total of France, Germany, Spain and the UK.
And the UK produces about 1% of global CO2 emissions (not that CO2 matters) but is being beaten bloody around the head by our f*ckwit politicians telling us we must be global NetZero leaders.
The fact is, we are the petri dish is a catastrophic experiment.
I don’t see the problem here. They’ve got thousands of miles of trackless desert which gets high intensity sunlight. From what I read in the news, it’s WAY WAY cheaper to just throw up some solar panels, and viola, gobs and gobs of free electricity.
They’re just being stubborn climate deniers.
Desert is greening. And how free electricity from solar is, we know.
forgot the “/sarc”?
Good satire, scadsobees. Plus they have a lot of cobalt and children miners for making EVs.
They already do it. They also build more and more wind.
Guess it’s like landline, they jumped straight to cell phones.
Do you run your refrigerator ONLY when the sun is shining.
But of course, you only expect third world countries to do that. !!
Racist little idea-log. ! !
You can charge a phone with a tiny solar panel. I do recall seeing a video of a native in the Serengeti- wearing a loincloth and carrying a spear- out with his cattle. He was being interviewed- probably by National Geographic or whatever- then the native’s phone rang- he got a call from a cattle buyer. 🙂
Has anybody built a solar panel or a wind turbine, storage system and distribution system without any input from fossil fuel?
One of the main problem with the climate change debate is the focus on the fossil fuel as fuel but more than 20 per cent of the crude oil is used in the petrochemical industry for various items including the plastic in solar panels, coatings to prevent corrosion wind turbine farms, wire insulation, etc. If crude oil is extracted from the ground exclusively for petrochemicals, there will be lots of wastes that are currently used for fuel or road asphalt.
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The US has had to give away many billions in subsidies to get some solar built.
Africa also has nigh time surprisingly, to you.
At night the population do things like…Oh I dunno…..read a book, cook, socialise, study, go to the fridge for a beer, run air conditioning, charge their EV’s etc.
Oh! Wait! They can’t, because solar doesn’t work when it’s dark.
Lets just sell them all massive battery packs they can use, at prices they can’t afford.
Then there’s all that extreme weather you clowns tell us all is happening, or will happen, or might happen, which isn’t happening. So winds turn over the solar panels if the sandstorms don’t sandpaper the panels opaque before that.
But that’s OK, they can clean them, with water they can’t pump because the solar panels are knackered.
They couldn’t make it work in Crescent Dunes, Nevada, what makes you think it could work in a developing nation like Africa?
Will this environmental hazardous waste site be cleaned up or will it’s bright glare be a reminder of the folly for decades or hundreds of years to come?
Et voila, another music lover! ☺
Sure, just put solar panels out there in the biggest sand dunes on the planet. No problemo. Notice the distances on that big map? They’ll need one very, very big and expensive grid. And much of the area in and around those deserts are now under despots and terrorists. Maybe if they had cheap and abundant energy and could build economies, there’d be fewer despots and terrorists.
But, your comment is so off the wall, I’ll have to presume you’re just trolling to stir up the locals, here. 🙂
Greenpiece tried that with a village called Dharnai in India.
After a few weeks, the villagers rioted, demanding “proper electricity”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0971721820903006
‘From what I read in the news . .’
Isn’t it just wonderful to be so informed ! !
One good sand storm and the whole bang shoot is buried.
Reality denier.
When humans reduced their CO2 emissions by 6% when COVID-19 hit, the increases in atmospheric CO2 rose at the same rate as before. Human reductions didn’t matter one bit.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2020/global-energy-and-co2-emissions-in-2020
https://www.co2.earth/monthly-co2
as I said as soon as that was apparent way back then and keep repeating, the CO₂ level ain’t rising because of emissions.
It’s rising because of an increasing deficiency of sinks.
i.e. We are destroying the biome. And we’re doing it simply by drying it out
Esp, The Desert is NOT greening – apart from over-eroded and abandoned farms being overtaken by invasive horrors like Mesquite (Africa) and that prostrate Cedar thing in the US
The sinks, such as ocean and land, are absorbing, but at a slower pace than the atmosphere, which absorbs 2.5/420, a rate of 0.6%/y
The 2.5 is from all CO2 from all sources and sinks, including human.
Does carbon isotope data support your hypothesis, Peta?
It’s not a hypothesis. It’s a belief. Beliefs do not require the support of data.
A 6% drop in human emissions of our ~4% contribution to the total is only about 0.24%. That amount is lost within the noise of natural variations.
For instance, seasonally, during the year, CO2 can rise up to about 8 ppmv from its low to its high. That’s about 2% of the current total. So, that is why our small 0.24% drop of the total is not seen.
It’s kind of like when I had a paper route as a young teen and my mother forced me to save a few dollars every week, while virtually all of my financial support came from my dad working. Nevertheless, after a couple of years, the total of those few dollars were noticeable in the balance of my savings account.
Yep, and CO2 has no meaningful effect on temperatures.
There must be lots of FF in Africa, worth lots of $$$.
Yes, but the west wants them for themselves, or kept in the ground.
Why should Africa be allowed to benefit from their own resources. !!!
COP are thoroughly ignorable. Most of the negotiators there have no power at home.
It is a two week party for irrelevant government employees, academics, and their fans.
Exactly. This morning I tried to use ChatGPT to find out whether this so-called agreement was enforceable. After getting a lot of propaganda and hedging I finally got my answer. According to ChatGPT, the only way this agreement is enforceable is that other countries can “shame” a country that ignores the agreement. (No kidding! That’s what ChatGPT says!) In other words, the whole agreement is just pure meaningless BS.
Agreed. Their futility is exactly the same as all the previous agreements before them. Anyone remember the Kyoto Protocol? How about the Bali Roadmap? Or the equally useless Paris Accord?
They have all been BS and no one had the slightest intention of implementing them.
I mainly use Claude as my chatbot. It can give good “why” or “how” type answers. I use chatGPT for looking up things like specs that it doesn’t have to interpret.
Africa maybe wants to keep their heads down…
As I calculated in a thread earlier today, the wholesale nurseryman growing baby trees in the field next my house is pulling CO₂ out of the sky at 37 Tonnes per hectare every six months
If that continued for 12 months (they were/are evergreen trees) and using the 3 Tonne per capita per year figure that Grauniad quoted for African Folks…
…. that means the farmer here is capturing the entire annual CO₂ emission of nearly 25 Africans
Are we not entitled, in this Modern World, to bill them for that service?
Mr Lomborg from a Swedish NGO that is all in on global warming nonetheless reports that each year 4 million people in the world die because they don’t have access to fossil fuels – sacrifices for the greater good? since access to fossil fuels is the fastest & cheapest path to improved standards of living, it is good to see these countries not caving to the green energy nonsense.
The Ugandan Energy Minister a few days ago told the delegates at COP wanting to shut down fossil fuel development in Africa to take a hike.
About 4.6 million people die each year from cool or cold weather compared to about 500,000 that die from hot or warm weather.
The cold or cold air makes our bodies constrict their blood vessels to preserve heat.
That raises our blood pressure and causes increases in strokes and heart attacks during the cold and cool months.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
This article says the ratio of cool/cold deaths to warm/hot deaths is 20:1.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
Of course the unspeakable BBC hasn’t mentioned this nail in the coffin of the otherwise failed COP28. I must complain
You can complain all you like, it just won’t make the slightest difference. Ofcom, BBC, govt. are all for the propaganda machine at the moment.
The BBC has other annoying habits.
Only today they had several on-site links to one of their COP28 articles, at least one of them was a very foolish headline. Starting to compose a reply/objection where comments were permitted, I returned to the linking page. Only to find that the headline I was about to quote had been changed.
When this happens, I almost always find the link has been changed to something less inflammatory. I don’t know whether this is done to give the appearance of “new” to a pre-existing article, or if a more senior editor has decided to wind their neck in a bit.
The best thing the developed world can do for Africa is allow it the tools to help itself. Using fossil fuels is a big part of that.
Africa needs to tell Europe and North America to take a hike.
European and North American people need to tell their climate-obsessed governments to take a hike. !!
I agree.
We all need to join hands across the ocean, as one people with one voice and tell the bloody UN to naff off!
I don’t know what naff off means but it sounds good to me.
The Africans should be allowed to develop their countries as they wish according to their own customs and values. They shouldn’t be forced to adopt the systems of the “developed” world.
Hmm. I wonder what the Sioux would have to say about that, Yellow Hair?
And if the majority of their cultures allowed it, they could do that.
The problem is Africa is a money sink that gets money form developed countries but fails to do the infrastructure. The money goes to the rulers’ lifestyle.
The west has attempted to impose its culture on Africa for hundreds of years. One of the main problems with centralised electricity production on the continent is the vast distances involved in distribution.
Most FF and nuclear need some sort of water cooling, which is mostly available on the coast, and the distance to the interior is huge.
Problems with solar and wind are much the same as communities are often small and scattered so even maintenance becomes a huge headache.
Africa has educated people but I suspect not many in engineering. Whereas China wants engineers by the millions. I suppose engineers can be corrupt too but they’re like to be a bit more productive.
>> Rather than fight for the lesser of two evils, why not defend the continent’s right to keep oil and gas in its energy mix long-term?
Any measure should be based on a rational cost benefit calculation.
So could you please quantify which evils we are talking about?
I clearly see poverty, starvation, deaths and shorter average life expectancy as one evil.
The other side is often not even called by it´s true name “the anthropogenic contribution to global warming” if that is what we are talking about? That is a very uncertain number and a solid African energy infrastructure will likely make an impact of less than a hundredth of a degree in the next 76 years, till 2100.
You should also factor in that these people often make false statements based on their model outcomes, like falsely dooming the golf stream or blaming extreme weather on CO2 while Alimonti´s paper strongly hints the observed patterns are an artifact (and seem to show the same trend independent if such weather is potentially influenced by CO2 like floods and droughts or nit like vulcanism and earth quakes)
Uh dont forget to factor in the global greening in your “two evils” approach, without a doubt saving lifes in Africa right now.
The climate enthusiasts really don’t care about saving lives in Africa, or anywhere else. The only thing they are concerned with is ensuring that every government repeats the same message ad nauseum and stays on-message.