email rounding up the latestThe global fight against climate change has provoked a fierce debate over the development of new oil and gas projects in poorer nations.
“We are not the problem,” he said, arguing that, if Africa were to use all of its known reserves of natural gas, the continent’s share of global emissions would still only rise from 3 per cent to 3.5 per cent.
She heads the New Producers Group, a project to share knowledge between 30 emerging oil and gas producers. Those emerging countries include Uganda, which aims to export oil for the first time in 2025 via a contentious pipeline being developed by France’s TotalEnergies.“For a country that is really low-income, that has significant energy gaps, that actually has a pretty high rate of renewables in its energy mix as it is . . .
But Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at clean energy non-profit group RMI, disagrees. He argues that any focus on developing oil and gas is a distraction that ignores the realities of the climate crisis and the opportunity presented to the global south by the energy transition. Consequently, the focus of the COP27 negotiators on preserving their countries’ rights to develop oil and gas resources was a missed opportunity, Bond suggests. “We are asking the wrong question,” he says. “We suddenly have this new [solar energy] resource. We should be figuring out how to use it, not how can we possibly maintain the old system, which doesn’t work any more.”