The horde has left Dubai, many in their private jets. Next stop in the champagne and caviar COPcon is Baku, Azerbaijan, which, at 92 feet below sea level, seems an appropriate place to bury Net Zero. The award came on the heels of an historic agreement between Azerbaijan and next-door Armenia, which both nations hope will bring peace to intertwined peoples with a long history of deadly strife.
Azerbaijan, a mostly Muslim nation of 10 million people, straddles Europe and Asia. It relies heavily on oil and gas production, which accounts for nearly half the nation’s GDP and nearly 93 percent of its export revenue. Baku has been an oil center since 1837when tsarist Russians built the first oil-distilling factory nearby.
Prior to the 1905 Russian revolution, Baku produced half the world’s oil sold in international markets. During World War II, Baku supplied 80 percent of the oil for Russia’s eastern front. The nation has rebuilt and expanded its infrastructure since liberation from Soviet rule in 1991.
But while the new Azerbaijani government rebuilt synagogues, it also, in 1990, began a pogrom to expel resident Armenians. Despite this and the recent conquest of ethnic Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region west of Baku, Azerbaijan won the right to host COP 29 when Armenia dropped its bid and supported Baku. The defeated quasi-independent Nagorno-Karabakh government agreed to dissolve as of January 1, 2024.
Meanwhile, the imperialists in Brussels and other European capitals continue to plot their abandonment of the fuels that supply 82 percent of the world’s electricity – a move that would destroy the Azerbaijani economy.
A dozen countries led by the Netherlands have announced crackdowns on what the EU calls “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” Canada’s climate minister, Steven Guilbeault, says harming oil companies “ensures that spending is aligned with climate ambition.”
Clearly, such planners have not gotten the memo. Or they choose to ignore the wisdom of the Global South (and China, too, for that matter).
As Brendan O’Neill so brilliantly pointed out, “African diplomats said at COP 28 that ‘the idea of a fossil-fuel phaseout [is] unworkable.’” Moreover, he added, “India, China, Brazil, and other nations are not prepared to sacrifice their economic health at the altar of our deranged anti-modernism.”
O’Neill also hits on the real story of COP 28 – that, for perhaps the first time in 28 tries, the clash between Western ideologues “who are exhausted with the modern world” and developing nations “who want in on the modern world” was out in the open for the world to see.
Developing nations spokespeople tended to agree. Nigeria’s environment minister, Ishaq Salako, expressed astonishment at the rhetoric of John Kerry, Al Gore, and others, saying, “Asking Nigeria, or indeed, asking Africa, to phase out fossil fuels is like asking us to stop breathing without life support.”
The G77 coalition of 135 developing nations also made it clear that its members will not stop using coal (and oil and gas, as well), which they see as vital to ensuring what a spokesperson called “a dignified life for our people.”
Kenyan agricultural engineer Jusper Machogu told the COP 28 delegates, “we want to flourish, we want to replace the 90 percent of Africa’s energy that comes from burning firewood, cow dung, and crop residue. We want to have the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and synthetic fertilizers, all available thanks to fossil fuels.”
After 500 years of exploiting Africa’s resources and doing little, if anything, to bring prosperity or even electricity to Africa’s billions, the West now seeks to bully Africans into abandoning a major source of continental wealth – and drive them deeper into debt to install ineffective wind farms and solar arrays. Only Africa (and a few other scattered poor nations) would suffer, as China and India have long since told their would-be superiors to pound sand.
The Institute for Energy Research notes that while nations “officially” agreed to reduce global fossil fuel consumption, oil, gas, and coal still account for about 80 percent of the world’s energy, with production of each hitting new records as world energy demand grows. Even the stodgy British, who proudly abandoned coal years ago, approved a new coal mine shortly after realizing the Russian oil might not be so readily available as an alternative.
Post-pandemic global interest rates, spiked by massive “Net Zero” spending by the Biden Administration and European governments, are adding to the already unaffordable costs of building new renewable energy projects. Cost, along with citizen outrage, is making it increasingly difficult to build new wind farms and solar arrays.
The UN admits that developing countries would need nearly six trillion dollars over the next few years to give up fossil fuels and try to power entire nations on intermittent energy sources – all of which would depend on either debt to mostly European banks or heavy strings attached to government-to-government loans or grants. Yet prior promises of $100 billion have yet to materialize.
[Maybe developing nations also see how Ukraine’s abandonment of its nuclear arsenal left that country vulnerable to Russian aggression.]
Growing backlash in Europe adds to the suspicion that Africans would never see the promised “aid.” At the recent EU leaders’ summit in Brussels, European Council President Charles Michel proposed cutting nearly all of a 10 billion euro fund earmarked for helping European nations build renewable energy projects (wind turbines, hydrogen plants, carbon capture) – a timid enough response to the profligate trillion-dollar boondoggles of the Biden Administration.
The simple truth is that not even the West has enough money to spare to disengage from the engine that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Matt Ridley cites a Climate Change Economics article that admits that achieving Net Zero by 2050 would save about a trillion dollars a year in avoided costs of climate change – at a cost of $10 to $43 trillion a year just to get there. Simply put, every dollar invested in Net Zero brings the West closer to bankruptcy.
O’Neill describes COP 28 as “a war of sorts between Americans and Europeans beholden to the eco-religion and developing nations more interested in growth.” Allison Pearson chastises the eco-religionists who ‘claim that they alone are on the right side of humanity” despite the fact that their project to “save the planet” spells a “painful reduction in comfort and joy for millions” (I would say billions).
Pearson chides the fearmongers who predict a “climate catastrophe” without Net Zero for ignoring the elephant in the room – that we are “certain to have an economic and societal catastrophe if we persist in trying to reach that goal by 2050. Humanity cannot bear it.”
O’Neill condemns the “neocolonial arrogance, its indifference to the needs and rights of people in the developing world” that stands starkly exposed at COP 28 as a vain search for meaning by a generation that so desperately wants to be as relevant as those who brought an end to racial segregation and Apartheid generations ago.
Energy consultant Tilak Doshi called out the “carbon imperialism” of the U.S., the EU, and their developed country allies at COP 26 in Glasgow for daring to dictate a carbonless future energy policy for the developing world. While that arrogance was still in evidence at Dubai, what has changed, he said, “is the pointed responses in opposition by government representatives outside the climate-evangelical Western group of countries intent on weaning the world off fossil fuels.”
Kerry, Gore, and the climate crowd are eagerly anticipating their visit to Baku, where they intend to lay out plans to turn Azerbaijan into a deserted wasteland and quash the hopes and dreams of Africans desperate for affordable electricity and other “modern conveniences.”
Perhaps, though, they should take a cue from the host nation and its historic enemy Armenia, who laid down their weapons to join arm in arm to welcome these glamourous barbarians from the West.
Gro Brundtland, when chairing the world’s first conference on sustainable development, stated that “sustainable” must yield to the higher goal of alleviating poverty, and in the real world, this must include energy poverty. It’s time to abandon climate imperialism – and to set Africa free to chart its own destiny.
That would be good for Africa, even better for the planet and all of its people.