The African president took exception to restrictions put on his nation regarding oil and gas retrieval.
QUICK FACTS:
- Uganda President Yoweri Museveni distanced his nation from the “brazen double standards” of Europe’s climate process “hypocrisy.”
- The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) took the time to discuss climate issues relating to Africa.
- The event entertained comments from African leaders who spoke about their place in the global climate process.
- Museveni responded to the nations’ assertions for what role Africa should take in fighting climate change saying that Europe’s “reprehensible double standard” is something that Africa has “come to expect.”
- The Ugandan leader characterized the Western nation’s agreement to allow some forms of energy investment while blocking Uganda’s rights to retrieve oil and gas for itself as the “purest hypocrisy.”
FROM MUSEVENI’S STATEMENT:
- “News from Europe that a vast windfarm is being demolished to make way for a new open-pit coal mine is the reprehensible double standard we in Africa have come to expect,” Museveni said of the changes on his blog. “As Europeans switch their coal-fired plants back on while still demanding fossil-fuel generation remains beyond the pale for Africans. It makes a mockery of Western commitments to climate targets and their promises to help speed African development all in one breath.”
- “We are told that these are only temporary measures, needed to mitigate the energy shortages caused by the war in Ukraine. As soon as the conflict ends, the race to a renewable future will recommence. In Africa, we believe what we see, not what we hear,” Museveni went on to say.
- “We see hundreds of millions of our own citizens without access to electricity. We see climate-compulsive Western investment in African energy funneled into wind and solar that creates intermittent electricity and not the consistent baseload generation required to power factories or produce employment. We see Europeans with jobs made possible by diverse means of electricity production, and Africans with neither, forcing tens of thousands to make life-threatening crossings of the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.”
- “For some years we have been told fossil fuel investment in Africa for Africans is unacceptable. More recently, through a multi-Western country agreement, a moratorium has even become legally binding. Now with Europe reinvesting in its own fossil fuel power industry to bring mothballed power plants back online, in a truly perverse twist we are told new Western investment in African fossil fuels is possible—but only for oil and gas resources that will be piped and shipped to Europe. This is the purest hypocrisy.”
- “We will not accept one rule for them and another rule for us. We will not allow African progress to be the victim of Europe’s failure to meet its own climate goals. It is morally bankrupt for Europeans to expect to take Africa’s fossil fuels for their own energy production but refuse to countenance African use of those same fuels for theirs.”
BACKGROUND:
- Climate activists were outraged when a German wind farm was distorted to make way for a coal mine to bolster the country’s energy supply crisis.
- As American Faith previously reported, the German coal mine “Garzweiler,” owned and operated by energy company RWE, admits the move is contradictory but says sacrificing one energy source for another is necessary during the ongoing energy crisis.
- “We realize this comes across as paradoxical,” RWE spokesperson Guido Steffen admitted in a statement. “But that is as matters stand.”
