Instead of “dangling funds before poor countries” for climate mitigation and adaptation, developed countries should spend that money on advancing carbon dioxide removal technologies “to clean up the mess they created”.
At the opening of African Energy Week in Cape Town on Tuesday, Omar Ibrahim, secretary-general of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organisation, a group of 18 countries including SA, said advanced economies had to take more responsibility for the decades of pollution caused by industrial development in those countries, and the climate crisis this has caused for the world.
Today’s advanced economies, he said, “did not stumble on the dangers of burning fossil fuels” in the past few decades. They have been aware of the environmental consequences of rapidly increasing carbon emission for a long time, yet they determinedly pursued industrialisation regardless of the consequences, Ibrahim said.
At the UN climate conference COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, developed countries committed to mobilise $100bn per year in climate finance for developing countries by 2020. This commitment, which has not been met, will expire in 2025 and countries are busy developing new climate finance goals.
“Now Africa is being told not to use reliable, accessible and dependable fossil fuels for its own industrialisation,” Ibrahim said.
Developed countries should “keep their money but clean up the mess they created” by investing in the development of technologies that can be used to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, for African countries and other developing nations, there “should be no no-go areas” in terms of the type of energy they can use to power economic development, said Ibrahim.
Developing countries have been calling for any new climate finance agreement to take into account the real financial needs of developing countries if they are to meet their commitments on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
A recent analysis by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change showed that developing countries need at least $6-trillion by 2030 to meet less than half of their existing Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
The countries represented at African Energy Week, including SA, Namibia, Egypt, Mozambique, Senegal, Nigeria and Uganda, also reiterated previous calls that more of the climate finance offered by rich nations must be in the form of grants and not be delivered, as has been the trend so far, as loans which added to the debt pressures faced by developing countries.
For example, it is expected that only 4% of the $8.5bn Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) between SA, Germany, France, the UK, US and EU, which will see investment flow from these countries to finance clean energy and other just-transition initiatives in SA, will be in the form of grants while the rest was offered as concessional loans.
The promise of international climate funds has seen poor countries that are eager to access those funds “submit NDCs that they know are not achievable”, said Ibrahim.
In its revised nationally determined contribution submitted at the international climate-change conference COP26, SA committed to reduce carbon emissions to a target range of 350-million tonnes to 420-million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent by 2030 — a reduction of about 20%-33% from current emissions.
The government has remained committed to this target even as a decision has been made to delay, where possible, the closure of coal-fired power plants that are nearing their end of life.
Also speaking at the opening of African Energy Week, mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe said SA has been put under pressure by developed countries to move away from coal as its main source of fuel for electricity generation.
But, he said, SA must be given space and time to “test new technologies” in renewable energy before moving away from coal.
“If we have to move from high to low emissions energy sources, we must ensure there is resilience and reliability of new technologies,” he said.
He added his voice to those of leaders from other African countries that spoke at the conference, criticising developed nations for “telling us we should not touch oil and gas”.
To rounds of applause from the audience, Mantashe repeated what he said at Africa Oil Week earlier in September, accusing “US and UK-funded NGOs” of “weaponising climate change” to stop new fossil fuel developments in Africa.
He also argued for African nations to consider exploiting uranium deposits on the continent to develop more nuclear power stations.
Mantashe hinted that SA’s revised Integrated Resources Plan, which provides a road map for the country’s future energy mix, would include the country procuring additional nuclear power capacity to add to existing capacity of about 2,000MW from the Koeberg nuclear power plant in Cape Town.
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