In 2015, a cartoon appeared in my Twitter feed that's stuck with me. It depicts an Indian family squatting, smashing solar panels. A woman chews on a shattered piece of glass, and a man attempts to smear mango chutney onto shards of photovoltaic technology.
The cartoon popped back into my feed when its creator, Bill Leak, passed away in recent weeks. The initial reaction to the cartoon centred around the racist depictions of Indians. On reflection, it represents a broader and worrisome attitude towards global energy politics: one that assumes idiocy in developing countries, combined with a push to burden these countries with the outdated and dangerous wares of a dying industry.
Recently, there's been a push by the fossil fuel industry to frame coal as necessary for the growth of the developing world — an appeal to generosity and positivity, rather than growth and greed. It's curiously similar to the transition tobacco companies have made, shifting their marketing from developed to developing countries.
The inverse, as was presumably the point of the cartoon, is that any technology that doesn't combust compressed dead plants to produce electricity is useless to the imbeciles that populate developing countries. The Telegraph said:
'Chris Kenny, a columnist at the newspaper, told IBTimes India that the cartoon was "mocking the Paris deal for spending aid on climate instead of reducing poverty", adding that "solar panels are not the greatest need in developing world".'
Leak elaborated: 'There's something obscene about the fact that there are billions of others who've had all those things all their coal-power-driven lives and they're now distributing solar panels to the world's poor because they think that provides a virtuous, if inadequate, form of electricity for which they should be grateful. I think that's racist, I think it's condescending, and I think it's immoral.'
But Leak's argument applied equally to his own directive: that carbon-intensive fuels, rather than independence and low-carbon innovation, are the only allowable cure for their poverty. This is a popular public relations line for the fossil fuel industry. The idea originated in the bowels of murky US think tanks, funded by the industry, such as the 'Advanced Energy for Life' campaign. It's insincere and illogical.
In terms of the logic of the claim, Mike Sandiford points out in The Conversation that: 'Given that cheap coal has been around powering electricity systems for over 150 years, why are any children still living in poverty?'
"In an effort to simulate