Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Egypt in COP21 : The Contradictory talk

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi represented the country as well Africa in the UN Climate Change “COP21” in Paris where he spoke about the need of international support whether technically or financially to combat climatic change impacts.
The Climate summit in Paris "COP21"
He spoke about how despite Africa was the least producing continent when it comes to emission, it is paying the most according to statistics.
As the representative of the African Nations at the UN Climate change summit, the Egyptian president presented the two African initiatives the world countries.
The first initiative is about the renewable energy and it is very important one. I do not understand the second initiative, but I think it is about the technical support to Africa to combat the global warming ..etc.
Egypt also presented its project to have the biggest
The Sisi’s speeches to the world in COP21 were fine and great but as usually they contradict what the Egyptian government or administration is doing in reality from projects that will affect Egypt’s environment negatively.
Egypt is going to rely on coal for 25% of its energy by the year 2030.
Sisi spoke about the impact of emissions on Africa and forgot about the impact of coal emissions in Egypt.
BY the way according to a UN report in the COP21, the construction of coal power plants will increase emissions predictably 4 times higher the 2 degrees target by 2030. 
It is worth to mention El-Sisi in his speeches that it wanted the target to be 1.5 degrees if I am not mistaken.
How are you going to achieve this in your own country if you are going to building coal power plants?
Of course, the advocates of coal say that it is no longer pollutant thanks to new technologies and that the solar energy can not be relied upon yet !!
I would like those advocates to see India and Germany.
I know that India is still struggling with coal but still, it is solar energy initiative is impressive.
The ministers in Egypt justify their decision to depend on coal that they would not let people hungry. Seriously, Sisi should have shared the statements of his ministers in this matter with the COP21 guests and activists about coal.


Unfortunately, it is not about the people because there are whole villages in Egypt without electricity access in the first place.
Then we have that mega project of Dabaa Nuclear power plant which we will millions to construct in very hard time in order to generate electricity in 2024 !!
Instead of building coal and nuclear power plants that won’t operate any time soon or feed the hungry people of Egypt tomorrow , we have to expand the solar energy use.
The Sun is another gift of God to Egypt and if we have already wasted the Nile , we still got the sun.
It will provide jobs, energy and preserve climate.
In India since 2003 , not less than 1700 villages were provided with electricity using Solar power and more villages are joining them.
Why not ask help from India, it is already providing training in Africa to the women villagers in rural villages on how to maintain solar energy.
If I were El-Sisi , I would go and immediately ask for Indian expertise in spreading solar energy in Egyptian villages.
I am not a scientist to say but villages in Upper Egypt can produce to solar energy enough to light the country and even to export it if it is done in the right way.
Instead of investing fancy mega-projects that may not see the light anytime soon, we can start in adopting solar energy and its projects. We can even export energy to other countries. Morocco already is constructing the biggest Solar plant in the world where it is expected to provide half of the country energy needs by 2020 and even there will be spare for export.
This is a mega-project that is worth investing in.
It is the future.
Already we played some role in the solar energy history after all !!

Updated :

I found out that the European Bank for reconstruction and development “EBRD” has allocated up to $ 500 million for 2016 to finance Egypt’s new solar energy programme. According to the EBRD’s statement “ The solar energy programme aims at constructing utility-scale solar projects within the private sector with a generating capacity of 2,000 megawatts, with many of them to be located in Upper Egypt”
This is a great start but still I wish we end that coal and nuclear projects focusing instead on renewable energy. Let’s take India and Germay as example in 2015 !!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank You for your comment
Please keep it civilized here, racist and hateful comments are not accepted
The Comments in this blog with exclusion of the blog's owner does not represent the views of the blog's owner.