Europe’s Energy Crisis Is Sending Leaders to Africa for Help – This Is Europe’s Problem And Africa’s Solution
A few days after the U.N. General Assembly adopted a declaration committing member states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, Europe and the other developed countries of the world are facing a crisis that threatens their ability to meet those commitments.
For the past few decades, Europe has been responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution than any other country in the world. It’s also become the world’s second-largest source of fossil fuel emissions. According to research from the European Environment Agency, Europe’s contribution to global warming is equivalent to the annual emissions of one continent of Africa.
This is not a sustainable way of operating and it’s not good economics. In fact, it makes economic sense to withdraw from fossil fuel production and move toward green technologies and renewable energy sources. But it’s also important for the world as a whole to take action.
So, the question is how to do it, and the answer is going to be different for each country. This is why the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund, announced in September, is so important. It gives governments in the “first world” a financial lifeline to help them with a set of clean energy policies, technologies, and market access in order to reduce emissions, improve energy efficiency, and create millions of new jobs.
But first, the United States, Canada, and many others have to agree to contribute their fair share. In fact, a lot of U.N. member states had been lobbying the Green Climate Fund to provide financial assistance to poorer nations for a long time.
In November, a U.N. report found that the global contribution of individual countries to the Green Climate Fund was the lowest of all the G-20 groupings. The same report also found that these countries have failed to meet the commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 2020 and, if the contributions were higher, would have done so by 2018.
It turns out, the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund, although it began as a temporary fund to help the first world transition to a greener