The last two days, under the soft lights of the Marriott basement, a white house block, energy ministers and technology founders from all over Africa gathered to talk about how best to bring electricity More than 600 million people on a continent who don’t have them.
Much of their hope and fear came from the vortex of changes that President Trump brought to US foreign policy, including the abolition of the power of Africa, the main initiative that supported them for a decade. Did Mr. Trump leave them? Or would his promise of “global energy domination” be a boon?
The participants received at least part of their answer on Friday morning. Chris Wright, the energy secretary of the new administration, entered the stage and gave a cheeky speech about how concerns about climate change should not prevent Africa from charging progress in the development of fossil fuels.
“This government has no desire to tell you what you should do with your energy system,” he said. “It’s a paternalistic postcolonial attitude that I just can’t stand.”
His remarks followed only a few weeks after the administration closed Power Africa, which, from the beginning of 2013, funded tens of millions of electricity relations since the beginning of President Barack Obama.
Africa, like the rest of the world, faces an immensely consequence: exploiting fossil fuels that contribute to global warming or forge a new path with renewable energy. Mr. Wright said Africa simply needs more energy of all kinds, including, and even especially coal, one of the most polluted fossil fuels.
“We had years of Western countries shamelessly saying they didn’t develop coal, coal is bad,” Mr. Wright said. “It’s just nonsense, 100 percent nonsense. Coal transformed our world and made it better.”
While Mr. Wright said climate change is a “real, physical phenomenon”, he said that he would not make a list of his 10 best problems that the world is facing.
Mr. Wright’s appearance on Friday is fulfilled with approval. His remarks have been in line with what many African energy developers have been looking for for years. They say that the durability of energy poverty is a bunch of continent development, and Western Skithisy to invest in energy projects, either because of concern about managing or greenhouse gas emissions, is similar to the posture of Africa.
The African population grows faster than current electrification rates. Officials often dictate on the proposal to decide on pure energy technologies to help fight climate change, instead of using their abundant stock of fossil fuels, since their countries have almost nothing historically contributed to the shows that cause global warming. Other countries used fossil fuels to build prosperity, the argument goes, so why should they not?
Other US officials who spoke to the summit said that, with Mr. Trump to duty, the days of departure from investing in fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy sources were over.
“When we say” all of the above “, you can ask, is that carbon code? And yes, it’s a carbon code,” said Troy Fitrell, a senior State Department and a former ambassador to Guinea. “There is no longer any restrictions on what energy we can promote.”
African executives in their own speeches said they hope they will get more investment and less regulatory obstacles. “We can’t wait for three years, or even half of that time,” to do evaluations of environmental or social influence on the project, said Akinwole Omoboriowo II, who runs Genesis Energy, a company focused on renewable energy sources.
“People die without a chance to watch TV,” he said, murmuring chuckles on the chuckles. “I just think we should think about it.”
Mr. Wright’s remarks left the main questions with no answers and did not describe in detail how much the US government would invest in African energy approach. Would you try to revive the authority of Africa but change his mandate? Can he bring his responsibilities under his own department? (Previously, Power Africa’s budget fell under the US Agency for International Development, which Trump’s administration has almost eliminated.)
What he offered was a Pro-African message at the time his boss had an unobtrusive Africans. Mr. Trump frozen assistance in South Africa last month and accused his government of using a new land law to discriminate against white citizens. Many African officials fear His administration will end the African law on growth and capabilitiesFor a decade Star Trade Agreement that enables 32 African countries to send billions of dollars of customs without customs in the United States. And in his speech Congress on Tuesday, Mr. Trump rejected Lesotho, saying that “no one has ever heard” the country.
Visible disappeared at the gathering were representatives of US agencies who took the lead on energy initiatives in Africa: USAID and the US International Development Corporation, which Mr. Trump created in his first term, but whose billions of dollars are currently freezing.
However, the meeting halls were full of former Power Africa officials and questioned whether Trump’s administration would follow a lot. “The biggest question is whether I can now be a credible partner when we have just dismantled our main mechanism for investing in African energy,” said Katie Auth, former Deputy Director Power Africa.
She and others admitted that the increasing focus of low -car energy focus made the program a program to the aim of administration that is hostile to what his officials often call the “climate change alarm industry.”
But Mrs. Auth also noted that Africa not only gave gas, but also that the sufferership costs of renewable energy technology made these forms of power fastest and cheapest to distribute in many African countries.
“I don’t think they realize that the power of Africa has never been a climate initiative,” Mrs. Auth said. “They encouraged it to be economic sustainability and guided by US companies.” She added, “If nothing else, this is an incapsulation of the kind of help that this administration should want to do.”
On the side of the planet’s show, the gas investment also collides with an additional obstacle: weak networks. The construction of multiple gas combustion power plants would require the construction of far more electrical laptops. It is a key difference with solar energy, which can be built locally at a local level, so that it does not require necessarily and huge, widespread network of transmission lines.
Rosemary Oduor, a top clerk at the Kenyan company Power and Lighting Company, a state utility assistance in the country, described African networks as “old trees that become large from fruit”. Without huge investments in their modernization and without major subsidies, she said, bringing new sources of electricity online could only make it more likely that it would perish.
