Those are two very different questions and need to be separated. But unfortunately, too many Europeans and their European cultural heirs prefer to conflate the two for cultural and economic advantages.

Focus first on Africa. Africa needs electricity, affordable, reliable, and continuous energy to break the industrialization barrier. That means that coal must be the mandatory first step. As a fuel, it’s readily available, cheap, and requires minimum technology and capital investments. After all, that’s how the colonial west gained its economic and industrial dominance over the rest of the world in the last 150 years. But then, it was dirty, filthy coal that gave us the power to mine, smelt, forge, and cast steel into the magical machinery of industrial nations. From the forges, foundries, and mills from Manchester to Pittsburgh, steel and the ability to forge it, cast it, machine it that allowed the colonial west to leapfrog all other cultures and nations into the modern energy state. Thank God we have since learned how to burn coal cleanly and healthily.

Yes, we turned our nations into an ecological dump for decades in the process. I recall the soot and filth in the London air. I saw rivers in Pennsylvania catch fire. I felt the acid air of Taipei and Seoul burn my throat and lungs. But there was a long-range, unspoken view that this is what had to be done to better humanity. So these countries built the industries and commerce that gave us the foundation for our modern world and the health and prosperity it empowered. But, in these past few decades, these former colonial powers are preventing developing nations from using this same mechanism to advance their countries into the industrialized world. And the U.N. and the World Bank, charged to assist these nations in developing, are using “ecological obfuscations” to retard their development and prevent them from competing for wealth and political influence.

Look, forcing African nations to build their future on unreliable and intermittent “green energy,” meaning solar and wind, is to deny them entry into the modern-industrialized world and keep them in “their place” as serfs and subservient to our needs. How can an emerging nation ever hope to compete if their only energy source is intermittent and unreliable solar and wind? How can they keep their factories working 24 hours a day, their schools and hospitals open, and students doing homework at night when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing?

Look at China and India, who have rejected the “colonial” model for industrialization. They told us colonialists “screw you and your impositions. We are burning coal as fast as we can AND after which we are going nuclear as fast as we can. Keep up with us now if you can.”