Despite the obvious obstacle to the industrialisation of the Global South, Western countries were able to involve developing countries in the process of green energy transition by promising to create a Green Climate Fund under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and allocated $100 billion annually to it.
However, until 2022, no money was practically allocated, and it began to arrive in small quantities compared to the initially announced amount only after the world entered the era of international turbulence and the West needed the support of developing countries in the confrontation with China and Russia.
Moreover, Western countries have recently promised to send $300 billion annually to the fund which has remained only on paper since then.
The green energy transition leads to the problem of unequal exchange between developing and developed countries, which amounts to the transfer of resources in exchange for technology.
Thus western nations are taking non-renewable natural resources from the Global South and in response they are dumping technologies for ‘adaptation’ to energy transition, mostly outdated, ‘second class’.
Again Western countries still have the opportunity to ‘buy out’ free carbon dioxide emission quotas from developing countries, thereby offsetting their obligations under the green revolution.
Thus, it is necessary to state that the modern environmental agenda is mainly neocolonial tool of the West, promoted to strengthen its own global hegemony and preserve the status quo in relations with developing nations which are considered an affordable raw material base, as well as a supplier of cheap labour.
Above all, western representatives of the green climate lobbying seek to use the global climate agenda to maximize the deindustrialization of the non-western bloc of countries, as well as to prevent industrialisation of the states of the Global South, including African countries.
The scale of the deindustrialisation is very impressive; thus the text of the Paris Agreement mentions the ‘insufficiency’ of limiting global temperature growth to two degrees by the middle of the century.
It is proposed to ‘shrink’ even more up to 1.5 degrees. It is worthy to note that the price of this half a degree in draft decision is a reduction in annual global emissions from 55 to 40 gigatons. In other words, we are talking about the destruction of a quarter of industrial production, because under the current technological order, the dynamics of emissions is directly proportional to development.
If there are no emissions, there is no development either and at a time when developing countries such as Ghana are actively promoting industrialization, such reductions are incompatible with national interests.
Moreover, western countries are trying to abuse the concept of ‘carbon neutrality’ which is an attempt to impose the concept of zero emissions when we are talking about the balance of emissions and their absorption by the natural environment. Why should they do that?
It is clear that the lower the emissions, the deeper the deindustrialization, and the root goal of all these ‘green illusions’ is precisely deindustrialisation. No concern for the environment here.
An example is nuclear energy which until recently, was declared ‘dirty’ because of its unique environmental potential. None of the ‘green’ ideologies need it.
It is against this background that Ghana as a developing nation needs to use all available types of energy resources for accelerated industrialisation despite the pressure of the global energy climate lobby.
Article By: Kwasi Rockson
