Energy hogs

Buakar Bah watches as his uncle shovels sticks of wood into a large red brick oven, where a fire is already burning. The dry wood sparks to life, and the young man’s eyes water from the smoke as it catches fire. While a brick chimney funnels some of the smoke out of the small concrete building, plenty stays inside, where Bah and his uncle Mamadou Jallo will spend half the day working and breathing the ash-filled air.

The traditional leavened loaves Bah and Jallo make sell for 21 cents apiece. Bah, 20, is glad for the job, but he hopes it’s temporary. He dreams of finishing his abandoned high school education and going on to university. Outside, the acrid smoke rising from the bakery mixes with gray plumes from hundreds of charcoal fires in the suburban neighborhood area called Greater Banjul, Gambia.

At noon, Bah loads fresh bread into the large wooden carrier attached to the back of a motorbike. Each day he delivers close to a thousand loaves to shopkeepers and customers within a 6-mile radius.

Bah bought the motorbike through a leasing arrangement. “I have almost completed the payments,” he says proudly.

When he’s not mixing dough or making deliveries, Bah goes down the street to buy firewood from local merchants. Much of the wood comes from illegally logged sources, and recent government crackdowns on deforestation are sending prices skyward. That cuts into the bakery’s slim profits. Most neighborhood trees have already been cut down as a fuel source for residential cooking. Running the bakery with gas ovens would be healthier, more efficient, and better for Gambia’s forests, but like Bah’s studies, that seems like a far-off dream.

Much of Gambia’s population—along with much of the population of sub-Saharan Africa—uses wood, charcoal, or dung for cooking fuel. In fact, 1 in 4 people in the world eats food cooked over an open fire. And of those, 3.2 million to 4 million people will die each year from heart disease, strokes, and lung disease caused by air pollution. The paradox is that the more prosperous a society grows, the more likely it is to use cleaner fuel sources. But in order to become prosperous, emerging economies like Gambia’s need access to cheap, abundant energy—of any kind.

Developed economies like those in Europe and North America grew rich precisely because they had access to cheap energy. But now that they are rich, their climate policies—ostensibly designed to prevent the adverse consequences of global temperature changes—are restricting poorer nations’ access to the cheapest fuel sources, insisting they transition directly to renewable sources of energy. In doing so, they delay the prosperity that could truly protect those in poverty from climate changes.

AS PART OF THE 2015 Paris Climate Agree­ment, Gambia pledged not to emit any additional greenhouse gases—a target known as net zero—by 2050. The country said it would reach this ambitious goal by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. That earned it high marks from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundation for the Paris Agreement. Gambia also earned an “Almost Sufficient” rating from Climate Action Tracker, an organization that measures governments’ climate action against the Paris Agreement. A good rating opens the doors to international approval and financial support: In 2023 the World Bank approved financing for Gambia—$20 million of which was to be dedicated to strengthening “climate resilience.”

Some of that money was likely used for more government workshops like the one held by the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy in 2022 to discuss curbing inefficiency in daily life by not leaving on air conditioners or lights in empty rooms and replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs. The country’s energy minister concluded her remarks with the phrase, “Energy saved is energy produced.”

Except that it isn’t. Energy not produced is exactly that. And energy not produced means no growth. Access to abundant energy is directly connected to gross domestic product (GDP) growth. If Gambia wants to grow its economy from the current $3,000 GDP per capita, it needs to produce—and consume—more energy, not less. Currently, Gambians consume 800 kWh per capita—compared to Americans’ nearly 77,000 kWh per capita. While some of the difference comes from questions of capacity and access, price plays a big role. A kilowatt hour in Gambia costs 19 cents, roughly the same amount as the U.S. average. But the median Gambian income is only $1,383 per year, compared to America’s $19,306.

“To get rich, you need lots of energy, and to stay rich you need lots of energy,” says Bjorn Lomborg, a researcher based in Sweden. “There are no low-energy high-income countries.” Lomborg is founding director of Copenhagen Consensus, a Stockholm think tank questioning the status quo on climate policies. Lomborg’s focus is cost-benefit analysis of particular policies and a clear-eyed, unemotional assessment of global challenges and their potential solutions. Global climate change is a genuine problem, he says, but not the existential crisis currently driving the narrative of many activists and lawmakers. But Lomborg warns that misguided efforts to reduce global temperature are already slowing the global economy, and that will have devastating effects on vulnerable populations.

According to researchers at Copenhagen Consensus, global economic growth in countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development—North American and European countries and Japan—has fallen from 4% in the 1960s to 2% in the 1990s to barely 1% currently. That’s not all due to climate policies, but their effect is clear over the last few decades. By driving up energy costs, climate policies drive down consumption. Money funneled to defining and implementing climate policies can’t be used elsewhere. The Copenhagen Consensus ­estimates that arriving at net zero—the ultimate goal of the Paris Agreement—will cost $27 trillion a year for the next several decades. For the European Union, that translates to 10.5% of estimated 2050 GDP—more than the cost of all core government services combined. And the benefit to projected climate change? Negligible.

Lomborg says that money would be better spent drastically expanding research into lowcarbon energy production. “Innovation is the way we fix all global problems,” he says. “We could increase R&D fivefold and that would still be just $100 billion a year.” Lomborg notes exciting innovative energy possibilities are on the horizon—fourth-generation nuclear is one—but research requires funding.

“If we find green energy that’s cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone will switch,” Lomborg says. “Not just rich, well-­meaning Brits and Americans. But also the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans. This solves climate change, and it’s a boon for the planet.”

JUST 200 YARDS up the road from Buakar Bah and his uncle’s brick oven, the scent of freshly baked bread wafts enticingly out of another shop: Nabil Bakery, where Sainey Sanyang, 33, pulls hot baguette loaves out of three gleaming commercial ovens. Nabil has been a neighborhood mainstay for 15 years, and it’s popular with the expats and tourists who stay in this neighborhood. The 12 workers employed here sell loaves over the counter, and others are loaded onto bikes for delivery to local residences.

Nabil has big electric ovens that produce thousands of loaves a week. That translates to high energy costs: The weekly electricity bill is about $400. When the power goes out—which happens frequently—bakers use diesel generators to power the ovens. That raises production costs significantly. Filling a 1,000-gallon tank costs $2,129, an expense that’s hard to recoup when the cost of a single loaf is regulated by the government at 21 cents. But at least customers will keep coming back.

Nabil Bakery is the kind of small business Magatte Wade says African countries need to grow their economies. Wade is a Senegalese entrepreneur and business advocate. She says that for African countries to become prosperous, they need pro-business environments. And part of that includes access to energy.

“You in the West can go on whatever suicidal path you’re putting yourself on,” Wade says of current climate policies. “But don’t come and tell me what to do with my energy, my resources.”

As a child, Wade was raised by her grandmother after her parents went to work in Germany. When she joined them as a teenager, she was shocked that hot water flowed instantaneously out of the tap. In Senegal, it took 45 minutes to gather fuel, start the stove, and heat the water. She set out to understand why Europe and North America were rich while Africa stayed poor. After starting businesses in both the United States and Senegal, she concluded the problem is overregulation in African countries. Wade often recounts the experience of starting her first business as a student in the United States versus starting ones later in Senegal: In the U.S., submitting the appropriate paperwork took half a day while the process in Senegal took more than two years.

Those kinds of bureaucratic roadblocks and ensuant corruption endemic to many African countries also affect the energy sector, deterring investment by increasing the time and cost involved in starting and maintaining operations in oil and gas production. That creates yet another roadblock to providing cheap, abundant energy to a country’s population.

Wade says she has no problem using emotion-­filled arguments to counter those from soup-can-throwing climate activists: “What about the 1 to 2 million African people—mostly women and girls—who die every year from indoor air pollution from dirty cooking sources? Are you OK with that? That’s where these policies are taking us.”

She takes particular issue with international organizations that view all African issues through the lens of climate change. “The World Economic Forum is more focused on climate change than on African growth, seemingly unaware that growth is Africa’s best hope against the vicissitudes of climate,” Wade wrote in a white paper for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. “Prosperous people can buy air conditioners, have larger budgets for food, and ultimately are more likely to work in air-­conditioned environments. Deaths from all types of natural disasters decline dramatically as nations become more prosperous.”

Similarly, while the World Bank acknowledges the need for electricity and cleaner indoor cooking methods, it still focuses heavily on keeping Africans from prospering from fossil fuels and on preparing them for a coming “energy transition” to renewable sources. It neglects the fact that with the affordable and reliable energy of fossil fuels, Africa could attain prosperity—and resiliency—more quickly.

Wade bristles at Western hypocrisy in denying African citizens the opportunity to become wealthy by using their own resources and then attempting to buy them off through promises of assistance. “I don’t care about your $100 billion of so-called ‘climate aid’ when you’re asking me to sit on the $12 trillion of oil and gas sitting under my soil,” Wade says.

In February 2025, Senegal’s African Refinery Company (SAR) started refining domestically produced oil for the first time. Before that, crude oil was extracted in the country, then exported for refining. Senegal then imported the finished fuel product. That’s a pattern also seen in other oil-rich African countries that did not have domestic refinery capacity.

Slowly that is starting to change. In 2023, Nigeria’s Dangote Refinery started refining crude oil with the hope of supplying more of the country’s demand. Late last year, Senegal announced plans to build a second refinery to process its oil riches domestically. That would open up the possibility for the country to one day export energy resources. In the meantime, plans for the $5 billion project rely on foreign investment from China, Turkey, and South Korea.

AYONDELE ONI is a Nigerian lawyer specializing in the energy industry. Over the last few years, he’s seen the start of a shift to an “Afro-centric energy” policy in many nations. That means not following the West’s framework for environmental policy wholesale but taking a more nuanced approach. “Some African countries are starting to say, ‘Let’s keep an eye on transition [to renewables] but make the most of what we have: gas and oil.’”

Nigeria’s government has declared 2021 to 2030 the “Decade of Gas,” with the aim of transitioning the country to a gas-powered economy internally and making the most of its potential to export fossil fuels. “The goal is to make as much income as we can now before the world no longer finds it useful,” Oni says.

Oni says the other African countries he works with are not averse to having a conversation about energy transition, but they want to make the goals more realistic. The climate agreement pact has the globe phasing out sales of combustion engines by 2035, for example, to reach the goal of net zero. But Oni says that’s impossible in Lagos, where only 2% of the vehicles on the road are electric. Even though that’s a vast increase from just a few years ago, agreeing to the original goal without a reality check is ludicrous. Oni says 2060 is more realistic.

According to Oni, any talk of net zero goals should go further than just reducing the use of fossil fuels: “We also need to talk about developing technology that can help us reduce the impact of emissions: carbon capture and carbon scrubbing. Renewable energy technology that uses batteries is heavily reliant on carbons. Lithium drilling, for example, is very gas-heavy to produce,” he says.

And for all the talk of equity in the climate debate, Oni cites one argument that keeps getting ignored: “If [the West] developed using coal, then why can’t we develop using gas, which is much cleaner?”

GAMBIA PROVIDES ELECTRICITY to its 2.7 million people through an electrical grid that runs 99% on imported oil. Most of the country’s electricity is produced at Kotu power station in Greater Banjul where the majority of the population lives, while several smaller generators serve towns to the east. Only 65% of the population has access to electricity, but the government says plans to bring electrification to the remaining 35% by the end of the year are on track. But electricity generation is already often less than demand, and outages happen regularly. Aging infrastructure adds to the problem. In 2019 the government announced plans for a 150,000 kWh solar farm to help supply generation, but construction has yet to begin. Most businesses and many homes have backup generators.

Preliminary exploration shows Gambia has offshore oil deposits like its neighbors in West Africa, with potential for sig­nificant production. That could be a boon for the ­country’s very young population: The median age of its 2.7 million citizens is 19.

But instead of encouraging development and self-sufficiency, organizations like Climate Action Tracker seem to want to push the country into further dependence on international aid: “At a time when countries should be moving away from fossil fuels, Gambia con­tinues to promote efforts to extract oil and gas in an attempt to offset its dependency on imported fuel oil,” the organization notes, adding that the most sustainable way for Gambia to escape market volatility brought on by the war in Ukraine is to switch to renewable energy and electrify transport. It concludes, inevitably, “To achieve this, Gambia will need international support.”

But between 2008 and 2023, foreign aid already provided 80% of funding for public investment. Further dependence in the name of climate financing erodes the independence Magatte Wade wants for her continent.

Wade has another emotion-driven argument to those who insist on ­climate-driven energy-­restrictive policies: the thousands of economic migrants who have drowned trying to get to Europe. “If you take the energy away, you’re not going to prosper. And that means people are going to leave the continent in search of jobs. And too many perish on the ocean floor.”

Spanish migrants’ rights group Caminando Fronteras says that more than 10,000 people died in 2024 while trying to get from Africa to Europe. Of those, it’s estimated that over 2,000 came from Senegal. This year began with a deadly boat accident off the coast of Gambia that claimed the lives of 30 migrants trying to get to Spain via the Canary Islands. Gambian authorities say they intercepted 780 more migrants in the days just following the accident. Wade says that without economic growth in their countries of origin, migrants will continue to risk their lives, and the number of illegal migrants arriving in Europe will grow even greater.

For Wade the most important trade-off in keeping cheap abundant energy from people like Buakar Bah, Sainey Sanyang, and the rest of Africa is denying them the dignity that the opportunity for financial independence affords.

“People want to stand on their own two feet,” Wade says. “Poverty doesn’t equal dignity.”

—with additional reporting from Olalekan Raji

To learn more about Bjorn Lomborg's transition from Greenpeace activist to climate policy critic, read “Bad investment.” To learn more about living with regular power outages, read “Life in Gambia.”

The cost of baking bread

To bake bread in a standard electric oven for one hour uses 2.3 kilowatt-hours (kWh). Baking bread every day for a year would add up to 839 kWh.

Who has access to clean cooking fuels?

Clean cooking fuels and technologies represent nonsolid fuels such as natural gas, ethanol, or electric technologies.

Who uses solid fuel as the main cooking fuel?

Share of households who rely on wood, crop residues, dung, charcoal, or coal as the main cooking fuel.

Who has access to electricity?

Access to electricity means having an electricity source that can provide very basic lighting—and charge a phone or power a radio for four hours per day.