Joe Biden will travel to Egypt next week to promote America’s re-emergence as a leader on the climate crisis at the Cop27 talks. But it will land on a continent where the US continues to pour billions of dollars into fossil fuel projects, with seemingly no end in sight despite the president’s promises.
The US government has committed more than $9 billion (£7.7 billion) to oil and gas projects in the country Africa since it signed up to curb global warming in the 2015 Paris climate accord, it has committed just $682m (£587m) to clean energy development such as wind and solar over the same period, according to official figures.
Two-thirds of all the money the US has spent on fossil fuels in the world during that time has gone to Africa, a continent rich in various minerals but also a continent where 600 million people live without electricity and where floodsheavy heat waves and droughts are taking increasingly devastating losses as the planet warms due to the burning of coal, oil and gas.
Last year, the Biden administration ordered to stop investment in “carbon-intensive fossil fuel-based energy projects” around the world, promising to usher in a new era of renewable energy. But sources close to the main agencies involved said there was no plan yet to follow the president’s goal, risking further greenhouse gas emissions.
“I was excited about the promises of the Biden administration, but over the last two years it’s been a slow step back to the point where you couldn’t tell Biden from [Donald] Trump on financing fossil fuels abroad,” said Kate DeAngelis, international finance program manager for Friends of the Earth, who said it was “absurd” that wealthy oil companies are supported by American taxpayers.
“It was frustrating and tiring to see so many lost opportunities to transition away from fossil fuels,” she said. “It’s business as usual. We see some of the most vulnerable communities in Africa being negatively impacted and disenfranchised.”
The Export-Import Bank of the United States (Exim) and the United States International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), major funders of foreign energy projects, have increased their support for renewable energy in recent years, but De Angelis said the DFC has shown no intention of ending fossil fuel funding. . “They told us they would approve fossil fuels in Africa and beyond, and not to be fixated on that, because they are also in renewable energy,” she said. “This shows a lack of seriousness [with which] the Biden administration is embracing this crisis.”
Exim is the official export credit agency of the United States, established as an independent agency by Congress in 1945 and charged with supporting American jobs by promoting exports through financing that private lenders are unwilling to provide. Over the past decade, the agency has supported coal mining in South Africa, oil drilling in Nigeria, and is now supporting a major gas project in Mozambique as part of a mission to “increase American exports across the continent,” as Reta Joe Lewis put it. President Exim, put in September.
Exim has pledged to spend an extra $650m (£560m) globally on renewable energy projects over the next year, but the agency is still seen as institutionally focused on fossil fuel investment and is bound by law not to favor any one sector, such as the wind or solar, over another such as oil or gas.
From 2016 to last year, Exim fossil fuel financing in Africa outnumbered renewables financing by a factor of 51 to one. This approach to lending threatens to undermine Biden’s message of climate leadership at the so-called “Policeman in Africa” that will take place over the next two weeks in Egypt.
“It’s critical that every government instrument has full zero-emissions alignment, so all agencies work together to drive clean growth,” said Rachel Kite, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University and chair of Exim’s climate committee. , although she did not speak on behalf of the agency.
“This is the most climate-aware administration the US has ever seen, but turning the ship around is very difficult. We are still seeing mixed messages to trading and investment partners.”
Seventeen of the 20 countries are most vulnerable to climate change are found in Africa, with the continent requiring an infusion of funding to help it adapt to the economic and humanitarian challenges of recurring climate disasters. Africa is also home to about 60% of the most sun-rich environments in the world, respectively to the United Nations, although the West has so far been far less interested in harnessing the continent’s sun than its fossil fuels.
“Many countries in Africa are in a dilemma because they need to industrialize, but this will require investments that will take time,” said Yuba Sakona, a climate scientist from Mali who is vice-chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ).
Sokono said there is a “great” opportunity to deploy solar power to move communities away from practices such as charcoal cooking, but such decisions are largely not made by Africans themselves.
“Unfortunately, these US investments are not feeding Africa’s development, they are creating fossil fuels for export, that’s the problem,” he said. “The US is not investing in the interests of Africans, they are investing in the interests of the US. We need to change this situation.”
Billions of dollars in financing provided by Exim and DFC, which has spent $3.4bn (£2.9bn) over the past five years to finance fossil projects such as oil facilities in Guinea and Senegal and a gas pipeline in Egypt, was, however, welcomed by some African governments as a way to raise living standards and benefit from resources previously plundered by Western powers. It would be “unfair” to prevent Africa from tapping its gas reserves, said Macky Saul, Senegal’s president. said in May.
This position has been processed cautiously by climate campaigners and the Biden administration, yet the International Energy Agency makes it clear that there can be no fossil fuel development anywhere in the world if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming. “We’re not saying there’s no gas,” said John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy. said last month after a meeting in Senegal with ministers from across Africa. “We’re saying that gas will replace coal or oil in the next few years.”
Carey said gas could act as a kind of transition fuel to renewable energy because it is relatively cleaner than coal or oil, although it involves the release of large amounts of methane, a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas. In 2019, Exim made the biggest bet on gas, agreeing to provide a $4.7bn (£4bn) loan to finance a project in northern Mozambique overseen by French oil giant Total. A separate deal to provide several billion more to Exxon for a parallel gas project in Mozambique, failed in 2020.
“Communities are left in limbo”
The General project has been plagued by strife, violence and the displacement of local people, mostly subsistence farmers, from their homelands on the coast of Cabo Delgado province, an area bordering Tanzania that boasts unspoiled natural beauty, including Quirimbas National Park, a lush network of coastal forests, mangroves and coral reefs – as well as severe poverty.
Total began construction of a port facility near the city of Palma to process and ship liquefied natural gas produced off the coast of Mozambique, only for operations to be suspended last April following a violent, unrelated attack by al-Shabaab. A militant group linked to the Islamic State in the region. A relaunch is tentatively scheduled for next year.
Exim said more than 16,000 American jobs would be created by construction of the project, even though it knew of the possibility of insurgent violence before it made the loan, the documents show showed. The threat of conflict in the region “poses challenges to U.S. peace, security, and development goals in the country,” according to a July congressional report found.
Meanwhile, more than 550 families have been relocated from Kitupa community located in the planned project area. A new village was established further inland for the displaced people, although the area lacks the vital fishing and agricultural resources of the original community, and resettlement was suspended after the attacks.
“Communities are left in limbo,” said Daniel Ribeira, the campaign’s coordinator Atmospheric justice, a Mozambique environmental group. “People in this region say the situation is much worse now, there’s a lot of anger and frustration. There was a lot of promise that this project would bring a lot of wealth, but you often hear people say they wish it had never come here.”
Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world, but Ribeira said the drive to exploit its deep gas reserves could only enrich members of the country’s elite and do nothing to provide electricity to the 70% of people who don’t have it. Allegations of abuses by government troops in Cabo Delgado were brought to Exim, Ribeiro said, though that did not dampen the agency’s support for the project.
“It saddens me that the US continues to say nice words but do bad things,” Ribeiro said. “Whenever there is a conflict between making money and making a moral decision, we know which will win. This is where the US’s ability to create beautiful narratives that hide the blood on its hands comes into play.
“At least China is not pretending that they are investing in Mozambique for any other reason than to make money. The US could at least say honestly that this project would be terrible.’
Exim was contacted for comment but did not respond. A spokeswoman for the US Financial Development Corporation said the agency is “committed to protecting US geostrategic interests while taking into account the growing demand for energy and security around the world.
“DFC is committed to investing in advanced, affordable and sustainable energy access in line with the long-term climate goals of the Biden-Harris administration, including a net-zero future,” she said, adding that the agency has invested in solar, wind, hydro- and geothermal.
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