Climate reactionaries and green colonialism
Why do climatistas hate the disadvantaged?
Jennifer Hernandez has a useful piece in a recent City Journal, about how the Green New Deal is actually harmful to the poor.
Well, yes. By mobilizing our entire society to transition to expensive and unreliable energy in pursuit of a phantasmagoria of unattainable CO2 emissions targets, climate activists are imposing a massively regressive tax on everyone. It’s wondrous to behold, really, especially in light of the obvious absurdity to anyone with eyes to see.
For example, we have a South African friend, who washed up in Syracuse after spending years in other countries as a political refugee. She’s self-reliant, hardworking, all the qualities one should value in an immigrant. She gets herself around from job-to-job in a used car. She just does it, doesn’t ask for handouts from anyone. So, how exactly is she supposed to benefit from $3.65 a gallon gasoline? From $10 a gallon gasoline, which is where the “Just stop oil” crowd wants to take us? Never mind, seems the attitude here in ultra-blue New York. It’s for her own good, you see.
Sanctimonious green paternalism is teeth-grinding enough. When it turns to green colonialism, teeth-grinding turns to teeth-gnashing. In the 19th century “scramble for Africa”, colonialism was the “white man’s burden.” It was for their own good, you see. Today, climate action is the “white person’s equitable and inclusive burden.” We must tell other countries how to run their affairs, because obviously they are incapable of deciding such things for themselves. It’s for their own good, you see.
As Jennifer Hernandez outlines, such green bossiness is cloaked in concern for the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. Climate change – sorry, the “climate catastrophe” – will afflict poorer people and countries harder, so better they make the sacrifice now so that all may live well. This is bollocks, illustrated no better than by the country where I spent quite a lot of time during my research career: Namibia.
A few years ago, I wrote something for City Journal about how green colonialism is hobbling the country’s development. I published it under a pseudonym, here.
That article was drawn from a longer manuscript which more fully explored the effects of green colonialism on a developing country with great promise whose future was being sabotaged by the northern hemisphere green agenda. What follows is that original manuscript.
Climate Follies. The Price of Virtue Signaling in the Developing World (23 September 2022).
Peregrinus
After being eclipsed for two years by the hot twin suns of the COVID-19 pandemic and BLM hysteria, the existential threat of climate change seems to be surging back. It’s not quite the Green New Deal (yet), but it’s bad enough.
Presently, I’m watching all this from Namibia, a beautiful country on southern Africa’s west coast, sandwiched between South Africa to the south, and Angola to the north. I have a long professional relationship with Namibia, so I know the country pretty well. It reminds me of our own desert southwest: rife with natural beauty, stark desert landscapes, wonderful people, and fascinating biology. To come to know the country, as I have, is to wish for its success.
Right now, the biggest obstacle to that success is … climate change. Not the effects of climate change, whatever those might be. Rather, the damage is being done by the fantasy that climate can be controlled by taxes and wealth redistribution. There is very little scientific basis for this claim. Rather, it is a virtue-signaling indulgence of the wealthy, and almost universally white, elite classes of the northern hemisphere. Largely lost in the warm, self-congratulatory feelings is consideration of the cost, which as is usually the case, will be borne by others. I have been able to observe first-hand how that cost is being paid in Namibia.
First, some context.
Namibia is a sparsely populated country, home to about 2.7 million people, occupying an area roughly the combined equivalent of Washington (8 million), Oregon (4.3 million) and California (40 million). Its economy is dominated by fisheries (supported by rich marine productivity), mining (diamonds, uranium, zinc and rare earth metals), and tourism (supported by magnificent game parks, beautiful scenery, and game hunting). By African standards, Namibia is doing pretty well. The government is stable, and the per capita GDP is about $8,900. The wealth is unevenly distributed, however. Namibia has the second highest Gini index in the world (number one is South Africa, Namibia’s neighbor to the south). The poor are mostly subsistence farmers that do not participate much in the cash economy.
Like most developing countries, Namibia’s population pyramid is heavily skewed to the young, where unemployment is high (roughly 38%). Among those lucky enough to be employed, roughly 60% work in the service sector. To keep ahead of the country’s demographic bubble, the productive sectors of the economy - manufacturing, mining, and natural resources – must grow. Presently, they are stagnant: GDP growth hovers around 0%, or slightly negative: per capita GDP has declined by about 10% over the last two years. Zero to negative growth will not support that rising demographic bubble.
And here is the rub. Growth takes energy, and rapid growth takes lots of energy. Presently, Namibia’s economic growth is limited by the lack of cheap energy. Namibia’s per capita energy consumption rate is about 30 million kilojoules per person per annum,[1] which is roughly a tenth of the United States’ (320 million kilojoules per person per annum). Namibia’s domestic energy production (of which about 90% comes from hydroelectric dams on the rivers along its borders) can meet only about a fourth of the country’s present demand. The rest must be imported, which is expensive, which hinders the country’s economic development, and which holds the country hostage to political turmoil in its energy suppliers, mostly South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Even so, there is ample room for Namibia to grow its domestic energy sector, and the means exists to do so. Presently, fossil fuels account for only 6% of Namibia’s total energy consumption, nearly all of which, like its electricity, must be imported. Off Namibia’s southern coast, however, there are proven reserves of natural gas sufficient to power its economy for roughly two centuries at its present energy consumption rate. Fracking would very likely improve that. Exploration in the eastern part of the country is identifying promising oil deposits as well.
Here is where green virtue and economic development clash: fossil fuels are frowned upon by the developed world’s green elite. Namibia is a signatory to both the Kyoto Accords and the Paris Agreements, and these agreements oblige signatories to reduce their national emissions of CO2. To meet its obligation, Namibia has formulated an ambitious plan committing itself to a 90% reduction of its carbon emissions by 2027, and to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
Here’s the curious thing: Namibia presently accounts for 0.003% of global emissions of CO2. A 90% reduction of carbon emissions would lower Namibia’s share to 0.0003%, a still smaller infinitesimal. Namibia could, if it so chose, aggressively develop its own fossil fuel resources to provide the cheap and abundant power it needs for its own development, and with no discernible effect on the global carbon budget: ostensibly the whole point of the “fight” against climate change. Instead, the Namibian government intends to reduce its carbon emissions through an aggressive expansion of solar and wind energy, which presently account for 0.5% and 4.7% respectively of the country’s total generating capacity. They face a difficult path getting there.
On a superficial level, it makes sense: Namibia is a very sunny country, with “vast tracts of unused land” for solar farms (its present occupants would no doubt take issue with that). Brisk steady winds prevail along the coast, so seemingly lots of opportunity for turbine farms as well. However, the entire “green investment” financial sector is notoriously risky, making wind and solar energy an investment market for the very rich who can afford to lose large sums of money. Solar and wind energy are expensive, unreliable and depend upon risky technologies that are probably impossible to develop at the scale the green elites imagine. Solar panels, battery banks and the catalysts for green energy technologies will demand extensive mining of rare earth metals, for which other countries, like South Africa and China, have a significant edge.
It would therefore seem imprudent for developing countries like Namibia, with per capita GDP a tenth of richer developed countries to be playing at that table. Fortunately, there is a ready stake of other peoples’ money to keep them in the game. The Paris Accords set up a money-channeling scheme known as the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Developed countries pay into the GCF, which then redistributes the money to developing countries for “climate reparations.” These mostly fund “adaptation” and “mitigation” projects to offset the supposedly impending ecopalypse being imposed upon the developing world by the rapacious West / North.
The GCF’s initial goal was to redistribute $100 billion annually in this way. The GCF (thankfully!) has fallen far short of its goals, having been able to pry only about $10 billion out of the developed countries’ treasuries. Even so, the funds constitute a substantial source of revenue for developing countries. Namibia, for example, is currently the recipient of $111 million annually from the GCF, which offsets about 11% of Namibia’s current trade imbalance. This little honey pot attracts other flies, which makes the balance sheet rosier. The French Development Agency, for example, contributes an additional $31 million to green projects in Namibia. The German government has contributed $5 million to a rural desalination plant, to be powered by wind and solar, along with many other small “green” projects.
In Namibia, GCF funds are channeled through a local government entity, the Environmental Investment Fund (EIF), which then decides what projects are worthy of support. Being a government body, the IEF’s funding decisions are shaped by Namibia’s national policy on climate change, which is very certain of the damages to come. There will be catastrophic floods. There will be devastating droughts. There will be famine. There will be thirst. Support for these group-think claims is drawn entirely from reports from other government agencies (which themselves must conform to government policy), or groups dependent on the pleasure of the NGO and donor class. So enters another firm certainty: there will be no place in government policy for the deep, and well-known, scientific uncertainties swirling around climate “science” and its many failures. There is too much money at stake to acknowledge that.
Most of the projects approved by the EIF are oriented to climate “mitigation and adaptation”, which serve mostly to distribute money to other activist groups. One of these, Empower to Adapt, [2] has distributed $10 million to 19 such projects, all of which must conform to the climate buzzword salad: “to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience of intended beneficiaries through climate smart agriculture practices to ensure food security”.
The main activity of Empower to Act seems to have been meetings, site visits and ceremonies. A considerable effort was directed to “climate change awareness”, which included writing newspaper articles, arranging radio interviews, advertising campaigns, and composing jingles. A great deal of attention was paid to “gender mainstreaming”, which will somehow be undermined by the “climate crisis.” How? Don’t know! Nevertheless, the report claims impressive results, with “recorded impacts” reaching more than 73,000 beneficiaries. These are ambiguously defined, though, and the climate change awareness program seems to have been ineffective: a recent survey showed that only 5% of respondents were even aware their government had a climate change policy.
“Fighting climate change” is a theme that runs through all these programs. This raises the obvious question: what exactly would “fighting climate change” involve, in a country, let us remember, whose share of global CO2 emissions is infinitesimally small. No logical answer to this question is even possible. But if there is money available to “fight” climate change, all sorts of pet agendas can be recruited to the cause by draping them in climate-fighting robes. So, farmers should adopt contour plowing as a weapon against climate change (shouldn’t they be anyway?). Water conservation fights climate change. OK, Namibia is an arid country, so water conservation makes sense anyway. But what about that certain much wetter future, accompanied by those devastating floods (Where’s the plan to build dams?) Reducing food waste fights climate change (wasting food is a bad practice no matter what the climate, but should farmers plan for drought, or ample water for agriculture?). And on it goes: avoiding plastics packaging, keeping a tidy house and yard, and so on, all good things, to be sure, and likely to improve people’s lives, but things that will not do a jot to “fight climate change.” But, there’s money at hand to spend, so we’d better do it.
We could just write this off as usual government folly, to be expected anytime governments get their hands on other peoples’ money. The green agenda becomes green colonialism when the other people use their money start pulling strings to shape a country’s affairs to the detriment of its citizens. In Namibia’s case, the clear need is economic development to keep ahead of the aspirations of its rising demographic bubble. That is being thwarted in Namibia, in fact throughout the developing world, by the green colonial agenda. In Namibia, this has had a number of perverse consequences.
For example, “green hydrogen” is the latest rainbow luring the Namibian government into the green agenda. Hydrogen is a combustible fuel which could, in principle, power vehicles, municipalities and homes. Hydrogen can be extracted from water (theoretically in unlimited supply), and water is the only waste product (no CO2 emissions). On that basis, Namibia has grandiose ambitions to become a major exporter of “green hydrogen” to the world. There are, however, difficulties. To make hydrogen gas from water requires electrical power, which in the southern African electrical grid means coal. “Blue” hydrogen is a cleaner form of hydrogen generation that uses natural gas to power electrical generation. That option is out for Namibia because of its obligation not to develop its own natural gas resources. That leaves “green” hydrogen, which uses solar energy to provide the electricity. Presently, blue hydrogen is the technology of choice, although even that is risky. Namibia wants to corner the far riskier “green” hydrogen market.
Namibia is banking on the construction of huge arrays of solar panels to fuel its green hydrogen ambitions. They will face enormous technical and logistical challenges in doing so. Those “vast tracts” of supposedly unused land are usually owned by others who must be persuaded to grant easements for government to install the solar farms. That will be expensive and burdensome, and a national park so far is the major site of solar farm development. Those vast tracts of land are also remote and poorly serviced by roads and transmission lines. How will the electricity get to the hydrogen plant, and how will the hydrogen be shipped? As long as the green money is flowing in, such things can be deferred to another day.
Nuclear power would be an obvious workaround for these problems, as well as the solution to making Namibia self-sufficient in electricity production. By all rights, Namibia should be well-poised to expand its nuclear generating capacity. Namibia is the world’s fourth largest producer of uranium ore (the largest is Kazakhstan, followed by Australia and Canada). Proven reserves of uranium ore could, if fully exploited, make Namibia the world’s second largest producer of uranium ore. Thus, Namibia has at hand ample fuel to power several nuclear power stations, and to do so without eating into the already considerable revenues Namibia earns from uranium ore exports. Based upon the capacity of the one nuclear power plant in the region (Koeberg Power Station, near Cape Town in South Africa), three to four nuclear power plants should both make Namibia self-sufficient in electricity generation, and power its economic growth up to the level of its more prosperous neighbor, Botswana.
Yet, there are presently no nuclear power plants operating in Namibia, nor are there plans for building any. It was not always so: as recently as twenty years ago, there was considerable enthusiasm in Namibia for nuclear power. In 2007, for example, there was a plan to buy floating nuclear power plants from Russia, anchor them offshore, and connect them to the electrical grid through undersea cables. Those plans were sunk by environmental groups. In 2010, extensive plans were drawn to have a fully operational nuclear power system in place by 2018. Local universities began to offer graduate degrees in nuclear engineering. After 2010, though, nuclear power has fallen out of view in Namibia’s energy plan.
The green colonists’ fingerprints are all over that deed. The Kyoto Protocol, which roped the developing countries into abandoning fossil fuels, also slammed the door shut on nuclear, ginning up “conditions that effectively exclude nuclear energy as an option” to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions. By 2016, the Paris Accords softened this stance, but fell short of recommending it as a worldwide strategy to reduce carbon emissions. Those tepid messages, combined with the toxic Western politics that swirl around nuclear power, have effectively scuttled Namibia’s nuclear energy programme.
I could provide more examples of the folly fueled by the green colonial movement, but in the end, one has to ask how all this is benefiting the country being colonized? The biggest problem Namibia faces over the next half century will be how to ensure that rising demographic bubble among the young can be productively employed. The only solution is to grow Namibia’s productive economy, which green colonialism seems to thwart at all angles. To be sure, those tens of millions of dollars spent on “climate change awareness”, for example - all those meetings, ceremonies, site visits, jingles, newspaper articles, and radio spots did provide income to a large number of people who otherwise would have been unemployed: waiters, hotel staff, caterers, artists, writers, bureaucrats, and many more. Those jobs will go away when the climate money goes away, however. This is because the service sector ultimately is an unproductive sector of the economy: it takes in a stream of money, and provides a service, but in the end, the world is not changed.
What will lift Namibia’s future will be growing the productive sectors of the economy - industry, manufacturing, natural resources, energy. The country is not wanting for talent in these areas, but the many bright young Namibian engineers, physicists, and agriculturists I have encountered too often find themselves employed as foot soldiers in the pointless and irrational “fight” against climate change.
Maybe, just maybe, their talents would be better developed if they were able to take their future into their own hands, without the meddling of feel-good climate activism of the northern economic elites?
Just asking.
Peregrinus is a pseudonym, adopted to protect colleagues and associates.
[1] Twenty nine million Btus per annum.
[2] Empower to Adapt: Creating Climate-Change Resilient Livelihoods through Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Namibia.