Green Colonialism
UN Secretary General António Guterres’s recently called for India to give up coal immediately and reduce emissions by 45% by 2030. This call has been received as a call to de-industrialize the country and abandon the population to a permanent low-development trap.
I’ll discuss this reception here.
Given current and projected emission levels, it is clear that climate change will be decided primarily in Asia. India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia will, in a sense, determine our global climate.
If these countries try to provide their citizens with the same levels of energy consumption that citizens of the developed world enjoy, and get there with the only known and proven method – fossil fuels – the world has a problem.
India’s annual emissions amount to approximately 0.5 tonnes per capita. This is well below the global average of 1.3 tonnes, and also well below those of neighboring China (7.95), or the United States (16.14) and the European Union (8.7).
Projecting current trends into the future, India will have about 184 GW of coal-based generation by 2030. To meet their development goals, India will require anywhere between 650 GW to 750 GW of renewable energy. But unlike the developed nations, which started with a stable and reliable energy infrastructure and phased in renewable energy, India does not have these spare, firm generation capacities. Installation of intermittent energy sources is not seen as sufficient for lifting people out of poverty. “Currently, manufacturing growth powered by fossil fuel-based energy is itself a necessity, both technological and economic, for the transition to renewables.” The lowest cost source for reliable energy is currently coal. Of course people could argue, that if you include a cost on carbon, coal is actually expensive and it is shortsighted to use this fuel source. That is certainly right, if you put emphasis on the future.
But people in developing countries suffer today from poverty and so the discount rate of the future is much higher in developing nations. It is not necessary to assign intrinsic moral rottenness or stupidity to the leaders or citizens of these countries; accepting economic realities and being empathetic to their needs is enough to understand the case for fossil fuels.
There are several really interesting aspects to the reaction to Guterres’s call, echoing Western youth movements: It exposes that the demands of groups like ExtinctionRebellion and international institutions are largely seen as highly regressive impositions from affluent citizens of the “First World” on the poor people on developing nations. “A section of concerned youth in the developing countries, fearful of their futures, but unsensitised to global and international inequalities, have also helped promote the undifferentiated rhetoric of a climate emergency for which all are held equally responsible.“
This frame does not acknowledge developed nations’ historical emissions as prohibitive barrier to their own ambitions and quality of life.
These groups’ dominance in and of Western news cycles and social media, focusing on extreme solutions and often stifling any dissent and thereby debate, has little sway over young people of color, struggling to improve the lives of their families. “Sacrificing for the climate” threatens their very life and calls for doing so are received as condescending and cold.
Meeting opposition might be a new experience for many of these inexperienced, young and often well-meaning activists, who might just have learned that is hard to actually make sensible offers people want to agree to.
So it is not surprising that there has been a change in strategy: Try to bully people into compliance.
Unable or unwilling to formulate compromise solutions or even a unifying vision, the strategy has shifted towards pressuring international institutions with the same smears and pressuring campaigns that are regularly used to shut individual critics up. In the worst tradition of colonialism, these institutions are today putting the interest of subsections of the Western population well above the interests of large parts of the populations in developing countries.
“[L]arge sections of First World environmentalist […] have turned to pressure the developing countries to bear the brunt of climate mitigation.” Policy changes, which cannot get democratic support in developed nations, let alone in developing nations, are adopted by unelected international institutions and private companies and enforced in their dealings with developing nations. This can include bans on credits for energy technologies, which are not liked by Western activists, particularly coal, nuclear and large hydro projects, as well as mandatory quotas on the usage of renewable sources.
But there is also something very beautiful in the reaction to the UN’s demands:
The whims of predominantly Western and affluent youths, which where once expected to be the command of the subjects of the developed world and enforced with the barrel of a gun, when necessary, have lost some of their sway. No longer do the leaders of the developing nations see these wishes of foreign powers as supreme to the interest of their poor citizens. These people finally have some agency and sovereignty, too. And they are asserting it! That is real progress on a moral and human level, in my opinion.
It makes dealing with climate change harder, though.
Climate policy is actually a very delicate, nuanced and complex topic with many social consequences, historical burdens and different political and economic interests. I don’t fault the enthusiastic and frightened youth activists for failing to take a mature stance on the topic and get into the political grind of what is actually possible to achieve. I do fault their enablers, sponsors and prompters, which have so far stifled real progress on the climate change question.
If these activists really want to make progress, without resorting to calls for boycotting poor people to keep them at starvation levels of poverty, denying some much needed financial resources to built critical infrastructure, like firm electricity generation for hospitals, or even military options to enforce compliance, I think it is time for them to call for far more R&D.
It only takes one technology, capable of producing reliable, deployable and dispatchable electricity cheaper than coal, to really make a dent into climate change.
It doesn’t matter, if it is geothermal, solar and storage, nuclear energy, hydrogen-producing algae, some CCS solution or far out there solutions like space or moon based solar power. It “just” has to cheaper than coal without subsidies or penalties.
A price on carbon, preferably via carbon dividends and climate clubs, is the next logical step. But care has to be taken to not do more harm than good. If these prices impacted trade with developing nations too much, their populations could be made to suffer. Hard, boring negotiations are necessary to find good solutions: delayed tariffs, credits for carbon-free energy systems, emission trading schemes, etc.
The world is currently spending far less than the US$ 100 billion per year that are seen as optimal. Of course, calling for “research” is not exciting, there is no protesting, chanting, dancing and partying. It takes quite some time to accomplish anything, it is not immediately clear, what the end result will be, and it is hard, intellectually challenging work. It doesn’t provide immediate relief and a sense of “doing something”. Additionally, it shifts the discussions away from: “We got all we need! Evil people are preventing it!”, which is, I presume, the source of so many feelings of righteousness in these young activists. Innovation can actually work, without any need for undemocratic forms of government or resorting to new forms of racially tainted control of the Western world over Asia and Africa via unelected institutions.
I think there is hardly anyone, who doesn’t smile sympathetically at their clueless, yet cocksure and impatient younger selves and so it is immediately clear, why my call for a shift in their strategies is very unlikely to be attractive to young people.
But then again, that is why we normally don’t have the literally least experienced and knowledgeable people set policies on other important political and technological issues. (This is not an attack on the intelligence of any of these activists, many whom, I am quite sure, are brilliant minds)