Climate change: How fossil fuel policy weakens Nigeria’s leadership role

The first African Climate Change Summit, which ended in Nairobi, Kenya last week has exposed a crack in Africa’s common position on how to deal with the issue of climate change. The inaugural African Climate Change Conference was not attended by the heads of states of the countries investing in new fossil fuel projects, making […]

The first African Climate Change Summit, which ended in Nairobi, Kenya last week has exposed a crack in Africa’s common position on how to deal with the issue of climate change.

The inaugural African Climate Change Conference was not attended by the heads of states of the countries investing in new fossil fuel projects, making the call to stop using fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) unpopular with governments of these countries.

Nigeria, Uganda, Mozambique, Algeria, Angola, Libya, Namibia and Mauritania are the nations with the largest upstream oil and gas expansion projects.

On the other hand, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique are countries with the largest number of new coal mining projects.

Nigeria: gas, a ‘matter of survival’?

Nigeria is currently increasing its oil and gas investments in several regions of the country. More oil wells are being drilled in states like Nasarawa, Bauchi, Kogi and a further exploration going on in the Lake Chad region around the borders with Chad and Cameroon.

Salisu Dahiru, the Director General, National Council on Climate Change (NCCC) and the country’s focal person for climate change, however told Daily Trust that Nigeria has one of the most ambitious energy transitions on the continent.

The Nigerian energy transition plan, which he said is the ‘second in Africa and probably the fifth in the world,’ has been articulated in a sector-by-sector basis. But implementation of the energy transition is pretty much slow due to rapid investments in fossil fuel.

However, Alhaji Dahiru defended Nigeria’s growing reliance on fossil fuels.

“Here in Nigeria for instance, this natural resource that we have, crude oil and associated gas is needed to provide 95 percent of our foreign exchange earnings and 65 percent of our federal revenue. Now we are saying what is the option of do-nothing scenario with your gas or petrol? Are we going to resort to coal which we do not have or solar, which we do not manufacture the infrastructure needed to tap the solar or the finance needed to put wind mills? The gas infrastructure is the closest thing for Nigeria to bridge the energy gap and help us deal with the energy poverty that we are experiencing. We don’t have to import the gas; we are not buying it from anywhere. We don’t want to burn it anymore, “we are going to use it.

“For Nigeria, the use of gas as a transition fuel in our energy transition plan is a matter of survival is non- negotiable,” he emphatically stated.

Nigeria energy transition journey, slow

The Minister of State for Environment, Dr. Ishaq Salako speaking in Nairobi said Nigeria has articulated an unchanging position to advance climate action without “jeopardizing economic development.”

“We designed an ambitious Energy Transition Plan to achieve universal access to energy by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2060 while prioritizing industrialization, job creation and economic growth,” he said.

Sadly, Nigeria has one of the lowest rates of energy (electricity) penetration in Africa at only over 30%, so it needs to step up its efforts.

But Dr. Salako said “Nigeria’s Energy Transition Plan requires $1.9 trillion spending up to 2060, including $410 billion above business-as-usual spending. This additional financing requirement translates to about $10 billion per annum but average international financing flows to Nigeria for clean energy have been about $655 million per year over the past decade.”

Nigeria has the highest numbers of portable generators, which use petrol or gas mainly to run their operations than any country in Africa. Officials said that the main focus of the country energy transition in the meantime would be to phase out these generators using either diesel or petrol but the process is very slow.

The country’s current energy transition focuses on five key subsectors; to decarbonize the oil and gas, which aimed at reducing gas flaring by 2030.

Other areas include clean cooking, decarbonizing the transport sector by replacing buses especially in the major cities with the high population density like Lagos, Kano, Port Harcourt, Abuja, Kaduna with electric vehicles-including in the interim, hybrid vehicles (those that use electricity and comprised gas).

However, the Director General of the National Council on Climate Change, who considered various arguments as the politics of oil and gas, natural resources, foreign finance, and development, acknowledged that progress has been slow.

“We have to make a business case for models that are replicable or widen in terms of their scope to be able to cover larger communities with renewable energy access in such a way that it will be cheap and sustainable” he said.

But Dahiru opined that stopping investments in fossil fuel will lead to ‘stranded assets’ and that is not an option for Nigeria.

“Take it away from me, in the next 10, 20, 30 years, the world will not be able to do away with fossil fuels in a number of sectors. Take the aviation sector for instance, some of us flew in planes that have over 400 passengers, take the average weight of such passengers at 60kg and some of us caring load that are 60kg and above, plus the fuel that the plane took, do you think there is solar energy enough or technology enough to flight that plane to wherever the destination is?

“If you take the shipping sector, the weight, the massiveness of ships beyond that of a plane, you think there is renewable energy heavy or concentrated enough to fuel those large ocean transatlantic liners that carry goods and services from different parts of the world?” He argued.

At the end of the African Climate Summit in Nairobi, the African leaders articulated a 66-point pronouncement known as the Nairobi Declaration on the continent’s position on climate change.

The declaration identified as a critical agenda for urgent collective action at the continental and global level.

The leaders in their affirmation seek to “uphold commitments to a fair and accelerated process of phasing down unabated coal power and phase out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies while providing targeted support to the poorest and most vulnerable in line with national circumstances and recognizing the need for support towards a just transition.

“We call upon the global community to act with urgency in reducing emissions, fulfilling its obligations, honouring past promises, and supporting the continent in addressing climate change, specifically to: Accelerate all efforts to reduce emissions to align with the goals of the Paris Agreement and honour the commitment to provide $100 billion in annual climate finance, as promised in 2009 at the UNFCCC COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark.”

Despite their declaration nevertheless, many activists said that the African leaders were missing the opportunity to recognise the urgent need to phase out all fossil fuels as an essential first step towards a just transition in Africa.

Delta In the weeks leading up to the meeting, civil society organizations warned against the prospect of such a gloomy conclusion for the future of Africa and the world due to foreign interests’ meddling in the summit’s agenda.

Head of Africa Campaigns & Advocacy for the Fossil Fuel Treaty initiative, Seble Samuel, while reacting to the declaration said “despite Africa being home to more power from the sun, wind and water than any other continent on earth, the Africa Climate Summit missed the chance to leverage this unparalleled potential. The Nairobi Declaration failed to call for the end of the three biggest perpetrators of the climate emergency: oil, gas and coal, and instead put forward dangerous distractions such as carbon markets. This narrative is not by accident, but by design. African civil society has been denouncing the hijacking of the summit by foreign interests. What is needed are the demands of the African people’s movements for alternative and sovereign development models, an end to the fossil fuel era and a people-centered transition to renewable energy for all.”

Fadhel Kaboub, president of The Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and an associate professor of economics at Denison University, was even more dismayed. He had feared that African politicians would be entangled in the global politics of fossil fuels.

“It’s not surprising, unfortunately, but extremely disappointing that the Africa Climate Summit got stuck in the fossil fuel trap. While it could have been an opportunity for African decision-makers to demonstrate their potential for climate leadership, and an opportunity for the countries of the North to help the continent benefit from it, this summit merely reproduced the usual economic dynamics that underpin inequalities and are known as ‘development policies’. Africa is not a bottomless pit for rich countries. On the contrary, they owe a monumental debt to the African people. It is time for them to show real international cooperation, which means helping the continent to move gradually and fairly away from dependence on fossil fuels in order to accelerate its energy transition. It is time for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, the missing mechanism to enable Africa and the world to build a future free of fossil fuels.”

Fossil fuel, the issues

Consider the millions of automobiles using oil and gas in our roads and generators in our major markets in Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Kaduna, and the black smoke that comes from their exhaust systems, which contaminate the air we breathe. Even the busy industries in big cities, which emit obscene amounts of dark smoke that have an impact on the surrounding neighborhoods. These are made from oil and gas-fossil fuel.

For decades, oil spillage in the Niger Delta region has destroyed the livelihoods of many communities by killing fishes in rivers, contaminating water supplies, and destroying vast amounts of arable land.

In terms of coal, a number of Nigerian heavy industries use it due to its affordability, and future coal-fired power stations are now in different stages of development, including the Egbin Thermal Power Plant Expansion in Lagos, Itobe in Kogi, Ezinmo Power Station in Enugu, Ashaka Power Plant in Gombe, and Obi Power Plant.

Scientists say burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) releases a significant amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases cause global warming and climate change (long-term changes to weather and temperature) by trapping heat in our atmosphere.

The United Nations says more than 75% of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases (heat-trapping gases in the earth’s atmosphere) and about 90% of all carbon dioxide emissions come from these fossil fuels.

The result is that we have a shift in global temperatures resulting in heavy rains causing floods, heat waves, droughts (absence of rainfall) and other associated consequences including outbreak diseases that kill or threaten many people in particularly in Africa.