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Eco-Colonialism: The Green Man's Burden

02 May 2023 | Backgrounders

Eco-Colonialism Transcript

Narrator:

The word “colonialism” describes a movement from the 1400s to the mid-20th century in which much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas came under the control of powerful empires centered in Europe, especially the British Empire on which, famously, “the sun never set”. And while some former colonies, like the U.S., Canada, and Australia, developed into modern, independent, and prosperous nations, many others, especially in Africa and South Asia, have been mired in poverty since the end of the colonial period. This pattern has led many historians to view colonialism, aka “imperialism”, as a disaster for most of the world and an indictment of the inherently domineering, exploitative nature of Western civilization.

John Robson:

It’s an oversimplified view. For one thing, the practice of conquering and colonizing other nations is as old as humanity itself. For another, it’s always mattered a great deal who was doing it. British rule in particular tended to bring the rule of law, institutions of self-government, and prospects for economic growth that showed no signs of emerging prior to colonization. Not to mention the suppression of practices like cannibalism or widow-burning that not even the most resolute multiculturalist seems to have much interest in defending.

It's also striking that the West has, from the beginning, been critical of its own colonialism in a way that you also don’t find elsewhere. There wasn’t sustained criticism of Mongol conquests from Mongol sources, or of Ottoman conquests from Ottoman sources, whereas as far back as ancient Rome we find the historian Tacitus deploring Roman expansionism.

Narrator:

Oddly, instead of learning lessons from the very real drawbacks of our own colonialism that we ourselves discovered and emphasized, like the need to exercise extreme restraint in imposing our will on other people, today we’re seeing the rise of a new and even more harmful version of Western imperialism motivated by environmentalism, in which other, poorer regions are being coerced into making decisions harmful to their own interests to satisfy the green ideology of the affluent West.

It’s called “Eco-colonialism”, and though the people behind it would cringe, or holler, at Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” it really is a replay of the older kind, right down to the conviction that they know better than the people they’re colonizing so it’s justified to make decisions for them “for their own good”.

John Robson:

But as we’re going to show you in this video, it’s not, and it’s creating big problems for all of us over the coming decades.

I’m John Robson, and this is a Climate Discussion Nexus backgrounder on the Rise of Eco-Colonialism.

Narrator:

Eco-colonialism has its origins in the sensible decision by the victorious Western allies in World War II to create the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both of which were set up to prevent the kind of fiscal chaos and collapse of trade that, it was widely believed, had played a major role in the social upheavals in the 1930s that led to World War II. As European empires dissolved after that war, these institutions increasingly offered the newly independent but generally poor and institutionally fragile “Third World” countries access to credit and a stable financial system.

Later, and on the same general model, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was created to help poor countries in Eastern Europe and Asia begin growing again after decades of disastrous communist rule.

These institutions, especially the World Bank, used to see their long-term mission as ending poverty. Up to about a decade ago, the slogan “Working for a World Free of Poverty” was on the World Bank home page.

John Robson:

But it’s conspicuously absent now. They’ve found a new cause, climate activism, which is not just different from ending poverty, it’s at odds with it because it requires turning off the main engine of economic development which is abundant energy.

Narrator:

Everyone who works in the field of development knows that the key to ending poverty is providing reliable and abundant power. People in the West long ago stopped having to carry water in buckets, grind grain by hand, dig ditches with shovels, or rely on horses and oxen to plow their fields. Even wind- and water-mills, a great advance in their medieval day, have been supplanted in performing these tasks and a host of others, old and new, thanks to the development, proliferation, and improvement of machinery powered by fossil fuels.

John Robson:

And when I say “powered by fossil fuels”, I don’t just mean the things that actually have a gas tank, there is a huge number of extremely useful devices out there that run on electricity that in turn comes from oil, natural gas, or coal power plants. The very first home in Britain to be lit with electricity was Cragside in Northumberland in 1863. But today the advanced world has so much electric light that you can measure prosperity simply by looking down from space at night, including on Western cities that actually suffer too much light. We’ve got light pollution but it sure beats the misery and danger of impenetrable darkness.

Narrator:

But as this chart from Oxford University shows, electricity abundance varies considerably around the world, with the richest countries enjoying a hundred times as much electricity per person as the poorest ones.

John Robson:

For those of us who have it, life without electricity is unimaginable. We’re sitting in a home with dozens of appliances running, including, of course, the communications equipment that allows our videos to reach you, and that your teens would howl if it went off even briefly, though perhaps not because they’re watching CDN material. And in that setting, it might amaze you to learn that the poorest 13 percent of the world still has no access to electricity.

That’s right. One in seven human beings have no plug, no light switch, no fan in hot weather, no heater in cold weather, no refrigerator, and no cell phone. Which is not something to laugh at if you live in a county where the infrastructure is feeble from telephone landlines to banking.

The problem is especially acute in Africa. While more people there now have at least limited access to electricity than they did a couple of decades ago, poverty and lack of electricity still go hand in hand, as this chart dramatizes with a remarkably close correlation line.

In one of the Harry Potter books, Hermione Granger is given a homework assignment on why Muggles need electricity. And it is remarkable to do the thought experiment, to step back and see how completely your life would be changed, and how much for the worse if the power went off and stayed off even for a few days. You can start by asking your dentist.

Narrator:

Without reliable electric power, appliances won’t work, there’s no water in the tap and the hospital closes. And these problems persist because, without reliable electric power, there is no economic development to fix them. Without electricity industries can’t operate power tools or run factories, so investors stay away. Without investment coming in, governments can’t finance the development of power-generating stations needed to attract industry. It’s precisely the kind of vicious circle poverty trap the World Bank and the other agencies were designed to solve.

John Robson:

And, for many years it’s what they did. Not without controversy, mind you: they were often criticized for encouraging poor countries to take on too much debt, and they had to do deals with a lot of dubious characters in third-world politics because many poor countries also lack basic democratic institutions. But at least they had a clear focus: providing the financing to help poor countries escape the poverty trap in the long run. Especially by building the power plants that would provide reliable, inexpensive energy.

Narrator:

When it comes to those plants, there are only a few ways to generate electricity on a large enough scale to power a country. In 2021, about 60 percent of the world’s electricity came from fossil fuels, ten percent was from nuclear, and the rest was from hydro and renewables like wind and solar. In low-income countries, the mix was more heavily tilted towards fossil fuels, which supplied 68 percent of the electricity. And in such countries, the fossil fuel of choice is coal, which supplies two-thirds of their hydrocarbon power generation.

Coal is popular in poor countries because it’s widely available, it’s cheap and it works. Well-maintained coal-fired power plants can give reliable power for decades. And of course, they’re much cleaner now than they used to be, just as modern factories do not look like the ones Charles Dickens or William Blake deplored.

Best of all coal gives power system operators precise control over the supply.

John Robson:

There’s more to running a power grid than sending Homer Simpson in to turn a generator on, eat a donut and take a nap. Operators need to balance demand and supply continuously throughout the day and the night. And that means they need sources of power that they can ramp up and down at a moment’s notice. And coal, oil, and natural gas-fired generators are very controllable that way. Hydro is sometimes as well, unless the water level is too low in which case you’re really stuck. Nuclear plants have traditionally been less flexible in this regard, they tend to work best at full capacity, though they have also seen improvements in recent decades.

But wind and solar, despite being trendy in the West these days, are the worst for reliability and controllability, for the obvious reason that they’re weather-dependent. If the wind isn’t blowing or the sun disappears, down over the horizon or something, they don’t work at all, and a system relying on them will experience blackouts.

In fact, there’s a joke about how odd it is that the people most convinced that the weather is getting worse are most insistent on relying on weather-driven energy. And it's inflexible in both ways, if the wind suddenly picks up instead of dying down, a large wind farm’s output surge can actually overwhelm a nearby grid and knock it off-line or damage it.

And wind and solar are also expensive to build, and I don’t just mean financially. They require a lot of land, which in addition to costing money or requiring expropriation, which is not the sort of thing that encourages investment in a country, they involve a massive ecological “footprint”. They’re not friendly to plants or to animals. And what’s worse, to make them useful for grid operators there’s gotta be a backup system powered by fossil fuels, so when wind and solar can’t supply power you can get it from somewhere. And that means that places that invest heavily in renewable energy end up paying twice for their generating capacity because they’ve gotta have the fossil fuel-powered backup generators that sit idle for long periods, but step up when the renewables aren’t available. And of course, rich countries may be able to afford the luxury of two entire generating systems, but poor countries can’t.

Narrator:

So it’s no surprise that most poor countries have had little or no interest in wind and solar-based systems. They’ve studied how the West developed, and they’ve seen that, in every case, we relied on fossil fuels to power our industries and become rich, from the early days of James Watt’s coal-fired steam engine and mechanical weaving to the petroleum revolution of the late 19th century and right down to the present day.

They know that lifting their people out of poverty and giving them the kind of lifestyle we enjoy, from refrigerated food to schools with lights, heating or AC, comfortable homes, and the ability to travel, means building power plants that can supply reliable and inexpensive energy. For developing countries that means relying primarily on coal. And up until a decade ago, governments and development agencies like the World Bank knew it and focused on how to help them build cleaner and more efficient versions of the ones we used so they got the reliable power we enjoy without all the smog that once contaminated the air in our cities.

John Robson:

But then the climate zealots took over. In 2013, the newly-appointed director of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, published an article in The Washington Post declaring a change in direction based on the alarmist theory that climate change is an existential threat.

Narrator:

“Global warming imperils all of the development gains we have made. If there is no action soon, the future will become bleak…the world needs a bold global approach to help avoid the climate catastrophe it faces today. The World Bank Group is ready to work with others to meet this challenge.”

John Robson:

Just like that, they pulled the plug on financing for coal-fired power plants even in poor countries. In July of that year, the World Bank issued a white paper with the Orwellian title “Toward a Sustainable Energy Future for All” in which they acknowledged the necessity of access to electricity before declaring that it wasn’t going to happen for poor people in distant places.

Narrator:

“The World Bank Group acknowledges the global challenge of balancing energy for development with its impact on climate change and will help client countries realize affordable alternatives to coal power. The World Bank Group will provide financial support for greenfield coal power generation projects only in rare circumstances.”

John Robson:

And, predictably, “rare” actually meant “never.” After 2013 the World Bank ended up contributing funds for only one coal project, $40 million dollars towards a $2 billion dollar lignite power plant in Kosovo which, some might note acerbically, is in Europe. Other than that, not only did they put the brakes on the kind of energy that works, but they announced plans to prioritize wind and solar despite the fact that they are too costly and unreliable even for rich countries to rely on them, let alone poor ones.

In the foreword to a 2017 essay for the UK Global Warming Policy Foundation, the former Research Director of the World Bank, economist Dr. Deepak Lal, slammed Kim’s decision to change focus, saying:

Narrator:

“He has overruled the cost-benefit estimates of the superiority of coal-based over solar- and wind-based power generation produced by his own economic staff, justifying this by reference to a wish to cut global emissions of greenhouse gases. In 2013 the bank adopted anti-coal funding policies, which, as the paper shows, prioritizes the green environmental agenda over its core developmental mission of poverty reduction.”

John Robson:

The World Bank wasn’t alone in imposing the West’s green obsession on developing countries. At a 2014 UN Climate Summit, the government of Germany proudly announced that it would block financing for any new coal-fired power generating stations in developing countries, even though the coal plants being proposed were, as we noted, cleaner and more efficient than the ones that Germany had relied on when it developed.

Narrator:

Adding to the hypocrisy, it is of course the same Germany that, less than a decade later, ramped up its own coal-fired power production to deal with the soaring cost of energy in Europe caused by a decade of bad energy policies at home and the effects of the Russian-Ukraine war.

John Robson:

The old complaint about colonialism was that powerful European countries were imposing their values on distant peoples and in the process robbing them of the chance to develop. Now, in the name of fashionable climate change alarmism, it’s happening again. Without even the sense of shame that, from the very beginning, prompted sharp criticisms of the original European imperialism from within Europe.

Narrator:

Instead, other Western-dominated global institutions followed the World Bank’s lead. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development also banned investments in fossil fuel energy projects in developing countries, and now proudly declares that it is a “climate finance leader” devoting almost half of its total lending to green energy projects, mainly wind and solar. A lot of its lending goes through the Climate Investment Fund and the Green Climate Fund, both of which focus on pushing those costly and unreliable wind and solar projects in poor countries, despite the problems they cause.

John Robson:

Of course, all the beautiful people got into the game. In that 2017 study for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, energy analyst Rupert Darwall describes how, after he left office, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair established a foundation called the African Governance Initiative, which he said would focus on electricity because it was “the single most important precondition for a country’s success.”

Unfortunately, he promptly began focusing on solar energy projects, joining forces with the Obama Administration’s “Power Africa” program which also focused on promoting renewables in Africa. Years later, a General Electric engineer summed up the failure of these initiatives to yield any useful energy.

Narrator:

“If you look today at the number of megawatts that are actually on the grid directly related to the Power Africa initiative, it is very little.”

John Robson:

The new Eco-colonialism has been an economic disaster for poor countries. And indeed Darwall goes on to quote leaders of developing countries pleading for Western authorities to stop playing Poohsticks with their people’s lives and futures.

Narrator:

“All renewables are intermittent. Renewables have not provided baseload power for anyone in the world. After all, solar works when the sun is shining, wind works when the wind is blowing, hydro works when there is water in the rivers. You must have coal…. I do wish people would reflect on the justice of the situation.”

Piyush Goyal, Minister of Coal, India, February 2016

“We in Nigeria have coal but we have a power problem, yet we’ve been blocked because it is not green, there is some hypocrisy because we have the entire western industrialization built on coal energy, that is the competitive advantage that they have been using, now Africa wants to use coal and suddenly they are saying oh! You have to use solar and the wind.”

Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, Finance Minister of Nigeria, October 2016

John Robson:

In addition to consigning billions of people to poverty, as if that wasn’t bad enough, western climate fundamentalism has become a major geopolitical blunder. When Western institutions shut off the taps for economic development, poor countries didn’t simply abandon their plans, they went looking for alternative sources of funding. And that created an opening for Communist China to step in and begin increasing its global influence, especially in Africa and Asia by financing construction of power grids, including, yes, coal plants.

And this push conveniently lined up with the Politburo’s long-term plan to become the dominant world power by 2050, a plan that’s been made much easier by the Western obsession with going to net zero by 2050.

If you haven’t seen our Climate Discussion Nexus video on China’s plans for 2050 you should click here. For now, we’ll just add it to the rap sheet against the Western green movement that, in addition to trying to block poor countries from developing reliable and inexpensive electricity grids, they have handed some of the world’s most vulnerable countries over to domination by the dictators in Beijing. And that’s a kind of colonialism with no upside.

What a strange thing to do in the name of saving people from themselves. Which, surely, we’ve realized we don’t really have a right to do anyway. And I’m happy to note that, as we were finishing this script, a number of news stories reported that developing countries from Bangladesh to South Africa were rejecting this new colonialism and developing coal power.

So, enough with the neo-colonialism. Let freedom reign, and let there be light.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson.

2 comments on “Eco-Colonialism: The Green Man's Burden”

  1. Amazingly, none of the Green Energy experts are prepared to talk about the real cost of Nett Zero, some who have put there heads above the parapet have said that it would “only” cost between one and two trillion - 1,000,000,000,000 to 2,000,000,000,000 - and that is just in the UK, and does not include infrastructure upgrading of the power network. This cost does not take into consideration the cost of disruption to the economy, the destruction of millions of jobs and more importantly, with the demise of secure, low cost energy, the elimination of the Construction material supply chain - no cement, steel, glass, plaster, plasterboard, bricks, blocks, hard paving, drainage or plumbing - and what little can be produced will be at prices beyond reason, making the “guesstimated” cost of one to two trillion nonsense and typically “low ball”. And our Green experts want to export this disaster to the poor nations who are already struggling with everyday costs without being instructed to drop everything, further impoverish yourselves and Save the Planet.
    Can I also add, just WHO are we saving the planet for, certainly not for the majority whose lives will be rendered unliveable once reduced to a serfdom economy, that leaves just the minority of rich promoters of Green Eco Saviour life - they will control everything, while contributing nothing, history will show that we have turned the clock back 800years.

  2. Follow the money. I find the motivation behind the push to “sell” climate change most interesting. This article clearly points out one of the top factors. The rich need colonialism. If the poor get rich who will wash my car? Pick my produce? Clean my house? They can no longer own slaves but they can pay slave wages and it’s all good because a poor man doesn’t know when he’s being exploited, he doesn’t have time because he’s working. In the 1st world countries you can get away with that, so the motivation is different. Create an economy in which everyone has to work to be happy. Then figure out how to confiscate the money they earn. Taxes can only go so far before the people rebel. But if you can convince them that there is an existential threat to their lives and the lives of their children, and the only way to prevent Armageddon is to completely rebuild the entire energy supply at a cost of hundreds of trillions over a generation. At the end of that rainbow is nothing. Nothing new, nothing better, you or more accurately, your children will have the same life as before, just a lot less money. But the world isn’t better, you won’t have more leisure time or get to travel more, cancer won’t be cured, poverty will still exist. Violence and war and hate all the same, only the energy system will have changed and the wealth will have been transferred from the working class to an ever shrinking group of elites. There will eventually be an uprising or revolution but it will be squashed by the next great existential threat.

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