Tuesday, September 24, 2024
11:30 a.m. EDT
Global Renewables Summit
Venue: The Plaza Hotel (768 5th Ave), New York
Host: Global Renewables Alliance
Click here to watch the full session.
Thank you very much, Mike. To my dear brother, President Ruto, President von der Leyen, Sultan Al Jaber, our new president of COP 29. Let me say how pleased I am to be here to speak this morning on this Global Renewables Summit.
But I’m going to ask us to pause a minute because at the same time that we are speeding towards this target, we have the reality of a doubling of fossil fuel subsidies. And at the same time, those fossil fuel subsidies receive 10 times that which exists for renewable energy. Equally, in small states, we face the reality that the cost of renewable energy supply and electricity to our citizens will probably be higher than the traditional use of fossil fuels.
It therefore means that we need to have some difficult conversations that really ought now to be put on the table. We have a deficit in terms of capacity, particularly as it relates to regulation. Ursula, one of the things that you insisted on in your speech was that the regulatory framework is critical to our being able to reach the target.
Permitting is critical. But most small states don’t have the level of skills necessary to create that regulatory framework easily. So while we speak to the urgent need for financing as we continue to do with the Bridgetown Initiative, and while we push for greater amounts to be applied there, not just of public money, but of other money and public-private approaches, we have to also come to grips with the reality that there are some non-financial issues that can also undermine our ability to reach this target.
The absence of that capacity within the framework of regulation is one. The second one, and Sultan, I think we have spoken about this in the past, relates to the procurement. We learned in COVID very easily if we ever forgot it, that we were small.
Because the orders that we will place will not even attract the attention of those who want to just clean up the storerooms. Our orders, therefore, will have to find a mechanism for pooled procurement if we are going to be serious about allowing small states to reach the objective of wanting to phase out fossil fuels and wanting to increase our reliance on renewable energy. But it’s not just the pooled procurement.
We may have to look also at pooled investment in regions. The reality is that in the Caribbean, there are certain countries that would like to move faster, but we have the opportunity for significant capacity in solar, wind, geothermal, and a number of other renewables. Bottom line is, however, that each investment will probably not attract any attention from you, Mike, because it’s probably too small.
But if we take the investments and pool them collectively and look for collective offtake agreements, then perhaps we can begin to catapult the level of speed that we need in order to reach 2030. Forgive me if I have spoken about these practical matters this morning, but if we are serious about reaching the 2030 agreement, the targets for 2030, then we have to be practical with respect to these other issues. I come now, before I close, to the issue of financing.
We cannot continue to believe that money is just going to come out of the air. It is not. And while we accept that there has to be far greater utilization of domestic financing than has been discussed thus far, the reality is that it is the partnership between foreign and domestic capital that is going to get us there.
Most of our countries are borrowing at rates that are just not sustainable. And that is why the Jet-B projects, wonderfully announced in Glasgow, really have not gotten off the ground with the pace that we expected it to. I want to salute President Banga from the World Bank for agreeing to introduce more 50-year loans for climate-vulnerable countries to be able to help us get part of the way.
I want to salute Kristalina for introducing the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, which allows many of us to be able to start to plan out our way. But even then, it is limited. And in our own case in Barbados, we’ve used a significant portion of those funds to partner with the Latin American Development Bank, the Green Climate Fund, the United States USAID, and indeed Guyana and Bahamas to be able to establish for the first time a blue-green investment bank in the Eastern and Southern Caribbean that will be a market maker to help close the gap with respect to some of the financing.
But even with those things that I’ve called out and congratulated those persons, we are still not anywhere near where we need to be. In Paris last year, at the Paris Pact for people and planet, we discussed, William, the fact that we are not making sufficient pace. We’re not moving with sufficient speed.
And we are not moving on a broad enough front. Sultan, you have been able to add significantly to the global financing with the establishment of Altera. But the reality is that we are not yet near there.
And my fear is that we say the same thing year after year after year, but the only difference is is that the temperature keeps getting higher and higher and the consequences of our failure to act with speed become real in so many parts of the world that have not yet hitherto been exposed to it. We have a moral obligation to get the financing right. And the next day, we will reduce, we will, sorry, we will put out Bridgetown 3.0, which takes into account the progress we’ve made, but sets clearly still the ambitions that we must reach if we are going to be serious about enabling persons to reach the targets for the global renewable summits, while at the same time not forgetting that the broad sustainable development goals must be our target because we are not one issue people. We might end up saving ourselves from doom from the planet, but then dying from something else like chronic non-communicable diseases that have overtaken our populations.
So what is important is a holistic approach, holistic approach to finance, holistic approach to project preparation and project execution. I started with the regulatory and the procurement and the investment because too often people believe that finance is the destination. And because we have spent so much time on the Bridgetown initiative, I know that we may have contributed to that because finance is one of the biggest issues, but it is not the only issue.
And settling and solving the finance will not cause our citizens to be able to benefit from renewable energy tomorrow because there is still a project preparation and a project execution capacity that Ursula referred to so appropriately. I hope, Mike, that this ability to bring us together, using your convenient power to be able to have persons to apply their hearts and minds to these difficult and complex challenges will mean that small island states will not be omitted from the preparation and the investment that can take place. We are often ignored because our scale is simply too small.
But may I remind you that small can also be dangerous. And the most dangerous animal known to all of us or living organism known to all of us is a mosquito. And therefore, we ought not to ignore what potentially can be done across one quarter of the world’s states that actually are small island states today.
Part of the difficulty is the duplicity of policy and the duplicity of approach. I say so not proudly, but recognizing that if I want to do carbon credits in Guyana, I will get probably one 10th of what I could get in Europe for them. There has to be a better approach to build trust across the world on so many of these issues.
If we can make progress on these multiple fronts, then we will come to be successful in 2030. If we don’t, then we are going to pay the price of failure. And those who pay the price perhaps are not in this room.
They’re the people whose voices and whose faces are not heard and not seen respectively. And our solemn obligation as leaders here is to ensure that they are not going to be put on the front line of either our failure to alter the status quo or to summon the courage to make the changes that are necessary at this most pivotal time in the world’s history. I am here because I believe we can do it.
I am here because I have confidence in the fact that this pathway creates jobs, creates opportunities, and ultimately secures hope at the very time when the world needs hope more than ever. I thank you, therefore, and I look forward to working with each and every one of you, recognizing, however, our limitations as small states and hoping that the partnerships will not only be in public and private sector for large countries, but also for small states. And I make one last point.
If we don’t find mechanisms as well to tap into the domestic capital so that they become owners of what we will bring about with this green transition, we will turn people who live as proud independent citizens into tenants in their own land again. We have not set on this journey to recolonize our people, but in fact to liberate them from a planet that is effectively in great crisis. Let us, therefore, do the right thing, but see people and hear people so that they can be part and parcel of the solution the world over.
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