In the first two days of January, the average Briton was responsible for more carbon dioxide emissions than someone from the Democratic Republic of the Congo would produce in an entire year, according to the Center for Global Development CGD analysis, which found that each Briton produces 200 times the carbon emissions of the average Congolese person, with people in the US producing 585 times as much, as a result of the vast energy inequality between rich and poor countries. Euan Ritchie, a policy analyst at CGD Europe, said that his work was prompted by the climate hypocrisy of western countries, including the UK and the US, which have pledged to stop aid to fossil fuel projects in developing states.
Ritchie said at Cop 26 there was lots of hand-wringing by rich countries about the extent to which aid and other development finance should be used to finance fossil fuels in poorer countries. The hypocrisy of this caught my attention. In just a few days, the average person in the UK produces more emissions than people in many low-income countries in an entire year, according to our analysis. It would be a cruel irony if the countries that have contributed least to this problem won't have access to energy infrastructure. Several countries, including some developing countries, have signed up to a pledge to end public support for international fossil fuel projects. The countries will be able to develop fossil fuels at home. The US has at least 24 pending fossil fuel projects, representing more than 1.6 gigatons of potential greenhouse gas emissions, while the UK is licensing new oil and gas fields in the North Sea.
The CGD research used World Bank data of per capita carbon emissions for each country, spread over a year, to calculate the point at which a British or US citizen's energy use exceeded that of someone living in a low or middle-income country. More than 940 million people in sub-Saharan Africa don't have access to electricity.
President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, who has committed Nigeria to net zero by the year 2060, and Lazarus Chakwera, the president of Malawi, have spoken out about their countries needing net zero via natural gas.
If 48 countries in Africa, excluding South Africa and several north African nations, tripled their electricity consumption through use of natural gas, the emissions of carbon would be less than 1% of the global total.
Vijaya Ramachandran, director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, California, argues that blanket bans on fossil fuel projects in poor countries will perpetuate poverty and will do little to reduce the world's carbon emissions.
It is easy for rich countries to impose fossil fuel financing bans on poor countries while increasing their own consumption of fossil fuels, she said. It is a case of hypocrisy and it is devastating for poor countries as they need a wide range of energy to fuel development.
Renewable energy needs to be backed up by other sources, as well as a well known source of energy. Telling African countries they need solar is completely hypocritical and colonial. The research director of Energy for Growth Hub, Rose M Mutiso, said that the CGD research should be used to inform the debate about responsibility for the climate crisis.
There is the responsibility of high emitting countries to solve the climate crisis in the medium term, not only because they caused the problem, but logically it is where high emissions are concentrated, said Mutiso, who is Kenyan.
She said that the video gaming industry in California is using more energy than entire African countries. There is this idea that in California, we can't live without video games or air conditioning, but we are worried about Africans moving up and consuming. It is important for us as Africans to know that our development is non-negotiable. All of those decades of exploitation and being left behind are owed to us. In a study released by Mutiso in the year 2019, it predicted that electricity demand from gaming in California would grow from 5 terawatt hours TWh in 2011 to as much as 11 TWh by 2021, the same as Sri Lanka s entire consumption.