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CLIMATE change is a serious threat to our planet and fairly obviously requires a global effort to both mitigate the damage already done and to move rapidly to a global economy where there is no net emission of greenhouse gases, basically carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.
But most of the world’s energy at the moment does come from petroleum, natural gas and coal and so the primary problem is how to accelerate the transition to green energy and, most critically, how to finance this change.
And we are talking about very large sums of money. While a lot of sources of green energy have low operational costs, the capital costs are huge.
In fact they are several times the cost of developing fossil fuel energy sources, and an order of magnitude higher when you have to calculate in the costs of storing the sort of intermittent energy that arises from solar and wind power, so the lights stay on when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow.
The developed world industrialised on fossil fuels. Most of the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution comes from a handful of countries that got in first.
And those same countries had already removed the bulk of their largest carbon sink, the huge forests that covered so much of Europe and the eastern United States.
President Mnangagwa continually brings up this problem of finance and alternatives for development in Africa and in Zimbabwe in particular.
While being polite and diplomatic, he has highlighted the hypocrisy that governs so much of the global debate and the policies and lack of action in much of the developed world, still the possessors of much of the world’s investment capital.
One idea that gains traction in much of the global debate is to ban coal. Much of the developed world can talk about this, although they used coal until very recently as the main source of electrical and industrial energy.
But while they have reduced coal, and are happy to reduce it more, this does not mean they have abandoned carbon fuels.
Huge gas finds in the North Sea and in Russia, plus the new technology of fracking in the United States, which has seen that country, the world’s largest energy consumer, in a couple of decades move into self-sufficiency for gas, has seen the replacement of a lot of coal with gas, which is now causing problems across central and western Europe as a direct result of the Ukraine conflict.
But while a country like Britain allowed its coal mines to close, it was drilling in the North Sea for gas and petroleum, and now wants to drill more. Its European neighbours were happy to close some of their mines, so long as pipelines brought in Russian gas and tankers could carry crude oil from the Gulf and Africa to refineries in their ports.
Admittedly a natural gas power station has half the carbon footprint of an equivalent coal station, but the fact remains that the carbon footprint of a small part of Europe is greater than the entire carbon footprint of Africa.
At the same time there appears to be a lot of resistance in many countries in the developed world to building wind and solar farms: they spoil the views of the wealthy, those who are most able to actually finance this sort of development.
And while trying to assemble finance for coal mining in Africa and for coal thermal stations is now next to impossible in many markets and international finance organisations, no one has suggested limiting oil and gas imports into those same countries. Telling Africa to develop without coal is accompanied by building ever larger tankers to move African crude oil to Europe.
For Southern Africa, where much of Africa’s coal lies close to the surface, this old fashioned fuel is the most dependable and, critically, the cheapest way of supplying the electricity needed to power mines and industries and give the people a reasonable standard of living.
For a start it is dependable for a 24/7 supply and that is required. Climate change is bringing drought, making hydro less dependable, and solar needs not just huge investment in panels, but huge investment in storage.
The tropics, the old doldrums as they used to be called by seafarers, are not the greatest sources of wind power. The sanest experts are quite explicit about the requirements of a global zero carbon economy. It requires a global programme to mobilise the huge amount of capital required to use the technology, that already exists, to replace carbon fuels with renewables.
It is not a problem of science or engineering, but a problem of money and of attitudes.
Promises have been made over helping the developing world develop without carbon. The sort of money promised was never enough, but could have made a large dent in solving the need to expand energy output in the developing world while reducing carbon emissions.
The money has never arrived, even in countries that are not under sanctions. Then there are other lobbies. Some environmentalists are so totally opposed to hydro because large rivers are dammed and areas flooded.
So this major renewable is very difficult to finance these days. While motor manufacturers talk about the coming of the electric vehicles, they want to keep building petrol and diesel vehicles.
Even burning coal to generate the electricity required would sharply reduce carbon footprints of the transport sector, so inefficient are internal combustion engines and so efficient are power stations and electric motors. But progress is slow as this is not on the very top of the political agenda.
President Mnangagwa has ably put forward the African case and has done so in plain language rather than the bureaucratic speech that can so dominate debate.
Africa needs to develop and its population cannot be condemned to perpetual poverty and living in the dark. If it has to develop with internal resources then it needs to use coal and petroleum while pushing ahead with renewables as much as possible but recognising the problems of energy security and capital costs.
If there was a very serious global campaign, and global means really global, to create the zero-carbon world rapidly with finance allocated according to need, as in war time, then Africa and other developing regions could skip much of the carbon-based development process and use solar, hydro and wind capacity to push forward towards an equal world. But finance in very large sums is required.
Since Africa and much of the developing world are on the receiving end of the climate change largely created by the developed world, there is no attitude problem.
But the developed world cannot even meet its own modest targets for reducing greenhouse gases, and some countries seem to be unwilling to try, with too many political leaders retreating into denial.
All this requires that climate talks move away from sticking plaster solutions, or embedding inequality, and start costing the energy requirements and then raising the finance required, everywhere. It is possible, but discussing engineering when the problem is attitudes in the developed world and money everywhere, but especially in the South, is not going to achieve this.
Online Reporter