A demand that Africa, the last truly poor continent, miss out on the known and useful route to being richer:

Africa must embrace renewable energy, and forgo exploration of its potentially lucrative gas deposits to stave off climate disaster and bring access to clean energy to the hundreds of millions who lack it, leading experts on the continent have said.

It is true that Africa is the last truly poor continent. It is also true that fossil fuels are a great way to start beating poverty. The demands that the poor - or perhaps these poor - must neglect the known and simple way of getting richer in favour of either a more expensive method, or even a method that doesn’t work, of getting richer strikes us as rather odd.

Almost as if there’s still some colonialism going on here - those poor people in foreign places should just jolly well do what we say - or even, given skin colours involved, some racism might be apparent.

We would note that renewables are rather more expensive than fossil fuels in these circumstances. Yes, it’s possible to construct models where over time the renewables come out cheaper but that is only after significant capital investment upfront. And what’s the thing a poor place, by definition, lacks? Cheap and low cost capital with which to make upfront investments, right?

Africa musn’t make money off of nature’s bounteous deposits and must also itself use a more expensive energy system and path to development? How isn’t this colonialism?