The hypocrisy of the rich world regarding fossil fuels is on display in its response to the global energy crisis following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. while the rich G7 countries urge the world’s poor to use only renewable energy for climate reasons, Europe and the United States ask the Arab nations increase oil production. Germany is reopening coal power plantswhile Spain and Italy they are increasing Africa’s gas production.
A single person in the rich world uses more energy from fossil fuels than all the energy available to 23 poor Africans. The most developed countries grew rich thanks to the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which today provide more than three quarters of their energy. Solar and wind power provide less than 3% of the rich world’s energy.
However, the rich are stifling the financing of any new fossil fuel in the developing world. Most of the four billion poorest people in the world they don’t have significant access to energy, so the rich gleefully tell them to "jump" from lack of power to a green nirvana of solar panels and wind turbines.
This promised nirvana is a farce consisting of wishful thinking and green marketing. Rich countries would never accept off-grid renewable energy, and neither should the world’s poor.
Consider the experience of Dharnai, a town Greenpeace attempted to make India’s first solar-powered community in 2014. Greenpeace received effusive global media attention when it declared that Dharnai would refuse to "fall into the trap of the fossil fuel industry". But the day the solar electricity came on, the batteries exhausted in a few hours.
Residents were prohibited from using refrigerators or televisions because they would drain the system. They couldn’t use electric stoves, so they had to continue burning wood and manure, which creates terrible air pollution. Throughout the developing world, millions people die from indoor pollution, which, according to the World Health Organization, is equivalent to each person smoking two packets of cigarettes a day.
Greenpeace invited the head of government to admire his work. He was greeted by a crowd waving signs demanding "real electricity". Today, the solar power system in disuse it is covered in thick dust, and the project site is a cattle shed.
Solar and wind power are unable to supply the energy needed for industrialization, power water pumps, tractors and machines; all the ingredients needed to lift people out of poverty. As rich countries are also now discovering, solar and wind power remain fundamentally unreliable. Without sun or wind there is no energy. Battery technology offers no answers: CurrentlyWorldwide, there are only enough batteries to power the average consumption of electricity for 1 minute and 15 seconds. Even by 2030, with a projected rapid rise in batteries, batteries would last less than 12 minutes. For example, in the German winter, when solar energy is at a minimum, the available wind energy is almost zero for at least five days, or more than 7,000 minutes.
Thus, rich countries are on track to remain largely dependent on fossil fuels for decades. The International Energy Agency estimates that even if all current climate promises are met, fossil fuels will still make up two-thirds of the rich world’s energy in 2050. The developing world sees the hypocrisy, as Nigerian Vice President Yemi elegantly put it. osinlow: "No one in the world has been able to industrialize using renewable energy" and yet to Africa "you have been asked to industrialize using renewable energy when the whole world knows we need gas powered industries for business".
Instead of immorally blocking the way for other countries to develop, rich countries should invest massively in the innovation needed to ensure that the costs of green energy fall below those of fossil fuels. In this way, everyone in the world will be able to afford to switch to renewable alternatives. Insisting that the world’s poor live without fossil fuels is a moral boast that plays with other people’s lives.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center andv visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has been considered one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century by Esquire magazine and one of the 50 people capable of saving the planet by The Guardian newspaper, of the United Kingdom. United. His most recent book in Spanish isFalse alarm: Why panic over climate change won’t save the planetwhich adds to his numerous publications, including thebest seller
“The skeptical environmentalist” and “Cool It”.
