The Rocky Mountain Institute’s climate & DEI colonialism in Africa

Editorial note: This essay was originally posted yesterday at Real Clear Energy.

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On Thursday, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) announced the sponsorship of 50 “women energy practitioners” for its first “Global Women in Clean Energy Fellowship.” The women will be working in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Zambia. If RMI were trying to win a climate colonialism contest, then it would be difficult to top this effort.

According to Our World in Data, there are 677.4 million people living without “an electricity source that can provide very basic lighting and charge a phone or power a radio for 4 hours per day.” Most of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, and 156 million of these desperate souls—23% of the world total—reside in those three nations set to receive RMI’s “women energy practitioners.”

For most of its history it was too easy to ignore the Rocky Mountain Institute. As recently as 2012, RMI’s total revenue was just $10 million. Compare that to the better-known Sierra Club’s 2012 revenue of $104 million. But the most recent publicly available IRS statements tell a different story: RMI reported $164.7 million in revenue, the Sierra Club $173.4 million.

Ignore them no more. The Rocky Mountain Institute has joined the ranks of the most influential energy policy nonprofits on the planet and they’re pushing their agenda on 156 million desperate, powerless Africans. For perspective, the combined population of our seven largest states (California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio) is 153 million. Imagine shutting off the power for the duration of the lifetime of all of those Americans.

There is a reason that “power” and “electricity” are synonyms. With 88.4 million humans living in inhumane darkness, Nigeria is the world leader in powerless people. Compare them to the combined total powerless population for the United States, all of the rich developed world, and most of the developing world, which is . . . functionally zero.

So, what is RMI going to bring to those powerless Africans?

Any claim that this is a serious effort is betrayed by the silliness of limiting the fifty fellowships to women. Are there no “male energy practitioners” in Africa? (We should probably give RMI some credit for implicitly acknowledging that there is such a thing as a “woman”—an otherwise simple challenge that at least one justice on the U.S. Supreme Court could not meet.)

And then there’s the RMI energy agenda, or lack thereof. It’s more accurate to refer to RMI as “anti-energy” advocates rather than “environmentalists.”

When they promote “clean” or “renewable” energy, they are deploying deceptive marketing phrases developed by NGOs opposed to the use of all the hydrocarbon fuels: coal, petroleum and natural gas. In the specific case of the Rocky Mountain Institute, this also means opposition to nuclear energy, which emits no pollutants nor carbon dioxide into the air. Nuclear is the only energy option we have that lands at the top of any objective ranking for cleanliness, safety, reliability and abundance—and has held that spot for more than half a century.

For RMI, the only fuels that count as “renewable” and “clean” are the unreliable options—predominantly weather-dependent wind and solar, pictures of which fill the RMI web pages.

According to Our World in Data, nuclear and hydrocarbon fuels account for 80% of the Earth’s primary energy consumption and 87% of American consumption. Even Germany, a nation that has spent at least 15 years and nearly a trillion dollars aggressively implementing RMI’s “clean” energy agenda, still uses hydrocarbons for 77% of its (now very expensive) energy.

Hydrocarbons are what made the rich world rich. Every nation on a glide path from poverty to prosperity must devour more hydrocarbons. To take one example, China is expanding its coal use at a furious pace. Energy journalist Robert Bryce reported in March that when China’s current coal powerplant buildout is complete it will be generating more electricity just from coal than the United States generates from all fuel sources combined.

But rather than bringing genuine and desperately needed energy to Africa, the Rocky Mountain Institute and its deeply deluded donors are offering unreliable renewables delivered by a women-only DEI initiative.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-rocky-mountain-institutes-climate-dei-colonialism-in-africa/