Amidst British and allied press psywar about the “end” of the Belt and Road Initiative (“China Pulls Back from the World”, Financial Times Dec. 16), an investment campaign to save Africa from losing electric power demands American participation, or millions of lives could be lost.
Bloomberg Quint wrote on May 8, “China Is Virtually Alone in Backing Africa’s Coal Projects,” which are absolutely irreplaceable until fourth-generation small modular nuclear reactors, with Russia’s additional input, begin to populate the continent late in this decade. Citing a $4.2 billion coal-power complex in Zimbabwe, which China has launched after Zimbabwe had sought for 20 years for a way to build it, The Quint reported, “Chinese companies and banks are involved in financing at least 13 coal projects across the continent with another nine in the pipeline…. Since 2000, the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China alone have supplied $51.8 billion of finance for coal projects globally.”
Some 65% of electric power in Africa, which still has half the continent not reliably electrified, comes from burning coal, dominated now by China’s “clean coal” investments. The big central banks’ Green Finance Initiative and Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) are forcing funders and engineering firms to sabotage coal power — with South Africa, for example, forced into planning to retire its entire coal power fleet by 2030. This fleet currently supplies 80% of the country’s power.
China and the United States are the two great economic powers with large amounts of domestic coal-fired electricity, under increasingly successful attack by the Paris Climate Accord and Mike Bloomberg’s Beyond Coal campaign. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been giving the developing nations coal power, but the United States must join this. According to former World Bank Senior Economist Dr. Wang Yan’s presentation to the Schiller Institute’s conference panel Dec. 12, China’s 259 projects in Africa, which created 137,000 African jobs from 2014-18, peaked in terms of foreign direct investment in 2016. “There is still a shortage of long-term capital,” Dr. Wang said. “Foreign direct investment is declining.” She said more multilateral lending by major economic powers is necessary, more sovereign wealth funds can be drawn in, including the new International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) of the United States.
Either the United States, China, and Russia collaborate in credit for the thorough electrification of Africa, including many coal power projects, or the sickly “green” wave will roll over the continent, washing power, and lives, away.
