By Prince Kurupati
Leading actors in the global energy industry, African leaders, captains of industry, policymakers and business leaders gathered in Cape Town, South Africa from the 17th of October for the African Energy Week 2023 (AEW). This year’s Africa Energy Week ran under the theme, The African Energy Renaissance: Prioritizing Energy Poverty, People, the Planet, Industrialization, and Free Markets.
Among the many distinguished high-profile actors who took to the podium to address the AEW attendees was Dr Omar Farouk Ibrahim, Secretary General of the African Petroleum Producers Organization-APPO who sought to outline a pathway on how Africa should move forward as a whole when deliberating energy issues on the global stage.
Dr Farouk stated that for long, Africa has always moved with the flow despite having its own energy issues which are distinct from those experienced by other global nations. He said that despite contributing an insignificant amount of megatons of emissions into the atmosphere in the past 150 years, Africa owing to its herd mentality has been forced to embrace and adopt energy policies dictated to it by the global superpowers – the same nations whose industrialisation polices of the past 150 years have greatly contributed to climate change issues.
Africa thanks to its rich human resource base which is bulging each day does possess the capability of formulating its home-grown solutions to current energy challenges. Dr Farouk said that the critical thing that African leaders and energy experts need to do is to just ditch the herd mentality and stand by their home-grown solutions.
Referencing the upcoming COP28, Dr Farouk said, “As we prepare to go to Dubai for COP28, it is important that we go with our home-grown agenda, not to continue with a herd mentality that has largely characterised our negotiation process”.
The added motivation for ditching herd mentality and embracing Africa’s home-grown agenda as relayed by Dr Farouk is that the developed nations have always and are still displaying gross selfishness and greed. The APPO Secretary General said despite knowing about the dangers caused by emissions since many years ago, developed nations continued with their industrialisation plans. Only now that they have fully industrialised and moved to “the production of services and artificial intelligence” are they advising all other nations to join them in condemning fossil fuels as dangerous to humanity.
“I say selfish economic activities decidedly because today’s industrialised countries did not stumble on the knowledge of the dangers of burning fossil fuels to the atmosphere in the last 50 years. As far back as 1896, a Swedish climate scientist Svante Arrhenius had established a link between carbon dioxide emissions and rising atmospheric temperatures. Before him, John Tyndall, an Irish physicist had in 1859 discovered the Green House effect, which is the process of atmospheric gasses trapping heat down to earth… But because these countries and their leaders were determined to industrialise, to make the living conditions of their people better, these studies were carefully hidden away from the public,” Dr Farouk said.
Moving into the future, Dr Farouk said that the developed nations must keep their “money” and commit to cleaning up the “mess” they created. The mess that he was referring to are the megatons of emissions which the industrialised nations have put into the atmosphere. If the developed nations manage to remove just a portion of the mess they created, Africa can use the same source of energy the developed nations used in industrialising to also industrialise. Dr Farouk added that Africa will however not need to emit as much as the developed nations emit to reach the same level of industrialisation.
When the developed nations in the next 15 to 25 years succeed “in removing from the atmosphere just 500 megatons or 20% of the 2,500 megatons of emissions that was added to the atmosphere in the last 150 years, primarily by the industrialised countries, that will allow Africa to industrialise using what is today, the most reliable, affordable and accessible form of energy, the same energy form that the developed countries used to get where they are today. Africa shall not put back 500 megatons before it gets industrialised. Even 50% of that shall suffice. And the world will be better for it. there will be less inequality and less envy. And more important the atmosphere would be 250 megatons less saturated with emissions,” Dr Farouk said.
Secondly, Dr Farouk said instead of the developed nations dangling funds before poor countries in the name of climate adaptation, mitigation, loss or damage funds, they should rather take the lead in investing funds to further develop and deploy CDR technologies.
Dr Farouk invited all African countries both those that produce oil and gas as well as those that don’t have these resources to join APPO. He said APPO is open to all nations even those that don’t produce oil and gas as they can become oil and gas “transit” countries.
