Here’s a paradoxical truth: To protect their people from climate change, some of the world’s poorest countries will have to burn fossil fuels.
In Sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, renewable energy — solar, wind, geothermal — ought to be the first choice for countries in need of more power. But they should be free to supplement renewables with oil and gas to drive economic growth and enable their people to adapt to a warming climate.
They should not be told to keep it in the ground.
So, at least, argues Todd Moss, the founder and executive director of the Energy for Growth Hub, a think tank that promotes the idea that the developing world needs abundant, affordable energy to thrive.
“Environmental impacts and climate emissions are very important,” Moss tells me. “They absolutely should be considered. But they're not the only thing, and in many cases, especially where you are dealing with extreme poverty, they're not the most important thing.”
Yet in a cruel example of the best laid plans, the World Bank, European governments, and climate activists — and, for a time, the Biden administration — all have tried to thwart fossil-fuel development, even in sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly 600 million people have no electricity at all.
Climate justice
Let that sink in for a moment. The powers-that-be in the US, where my suburban neighbors drive big cars and live in big homes, and where per capita greenhouse gas emissions are about three times the world average, wanted — until the Trump administration came along — to deny people in sub-Saharan Africa access to fossil fuels. Is that climate justice?
The Energy For Growth Hub reminds us that energy is the key to prosperity. There are no low-energy, high-income countries. Take a look at the “empty quadrant” of this graphic:
What’s more, rich and middle-income people in the US and the EU are much better able than poor people to deal with the natural disasters—droughts, floods, storms and extreme temperatures—associated with climate change.
Wildfires and extreme heat have been in the news all summer, but you don’t often read that deaths from natural disasters are falling. That’s because the world has become richer. In an excellent article on natural disasters, Our World in Data notes:
Over the last century, death rates have fallen by more than 90%.
Even the total number of deaths has fallen substantially, despite there being four times as many people in the world as 100 years ago.
This is not because hazards have become weaker. It’s because societies have become more resilient.
Weather forecasts, early-warning systems, stronger buildings, air conditioning and modern agriculture better prepare people for climate impacts. They all cost money and require lots of energy.
Back to Todd Moss. We met in 2018, when governments and philanthropy were enamored of social enterprises (D.Light, Greenlight Planet, BrightLife) and nonprofits (SolarAid, GivePower) that delivered solar panels, lights or phone chargers to households in Africa and south Asia. I had done a deep dive into so-called clean cookstoves, a pet project of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. On a visit to Tanzania, President Obama had kicked around a Soccket, a soccer ball invented by Harvard undergrads that was supposed to generate electricity. It flopped.
Moss, who was then a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, created the Energy For Growth Hub to persuade policymakers to think bigger and get behind an all-of-the-above approach to deliver energy to industries and business, as well as households—even if that means accepting a small setback in the fight against climate change.
The nuclear option
He’s made progress, he says. Working with allies across the political spectrum, including ClearPath and Third Way, as well as the Biden and Trump administrations, Energy for Growth helped to end decades-long bans on financing nuclear power at the World Bank, Asian and Inter-American Development Banks.
Currently, South Africa operates the only nuclear plant in Sub-Saharan Africa. Kenya and Ghana have nuclear ambitions that include development plans but neither has a vendor or financing. Next-generation, small-scale nukes could provide baseload power with data centers as their anchor customers.
“We have really been pushing for the administration to do a lot more on nuclear,” Moss says.
Geothermal energy has great potential, too, as a source of clean, low-cost baseline power. Kenya is the flagship case; it generates nearly half of its electricity from the geothermal plants along the Great Rift Valley, a fault line that stretches more than 3,500 miles to from Lebanon to Mozambique.
The issue of fossil fuels has been more contested, with environmental groups taking a hard-line against new projects. Friends of the Earth sued the US Export-Import Bank and UK Export Finance (here and here) over their support for a massive liquified natural gas project in Mozambique. Joining European nations, the Biden administration promised in 2021 to end all new public financing for coal, oil and gas projects overseas. They were cheered on by the Sierra Club and NRDC, who argue that building new fossil fuel projects will worse the climate crisis and undermine support for renewable energy. They also warn that countries could be left with outdated and expensive assets, as the costs of solar and wind energy and batteries continue to fall.
Moss rejects those arguments. Instead of blocking renewables, natural gas can make it easier to build solar and wind projects by providing power that can ramp up or down as needed. Increases in climate emissions would be negligible. Excluding South Africa, the 48 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa emit about 1.6 percent of global CO2 emissions. The average person in Chad or Niger emits in a year what the average American emits in two or three days.
Moss and his allies spent much of the Biden years lobbying the administration to soften its opposition to natural gas projects, with some success. Now they are urging the Trump administration—which embraced fossil fuels and cancelled “just transition” projects designed to help South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam replace coal plants with clean energy—to support renewables as well as nuclear and geothermal.
“Let’s be technology-agnostic,” Moss says. “Let’s not kill the solar and wind potential, which is tremendous.”
The good news is that the conversation about climate and poverty in Africa and south Asia has become more constructive. Vijaya Ramachandran, director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute, has written a lot about the development banks under such headlines as Where Emissions are High, Reduce Emissions. Where Poverty is High, Reduce Poverty. (Makes sense to me.) In last fall’s excellent Gates Notes, Bill Gates wrote that it’s time to
refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.
Climate change may or may not be the biggest problem facing the world. I hope we can agree that it’s not the only problem.
There is a huge story here about NGOs (international and domestic) and senior officials in developing countries conniving to drive a climate change policy narrative that works against the interests of people in poorer countries. These countries should be concerned primarily (and perhaps only) with adaptation and resilience to inevitable climate change that they cannot stop and mostly did not cause. The best form of adaptation is to be more prosperous: fewer weather-exposed livelihoods, more robust infrastructure for transport, water and energy, better-built housing, adaptable healthcare, controlled interior environments and so on - the things that make life bearable as the weather changes. That's all about achieving equitable growth. The problem is that many of the mitigation options that drive the policy discourse are expensive, untried, or complex, and work against growth and prosperity. The NGOs and foundations involved have been exploitative, and I'm glad to see you getting involved.