Clinton admin Export-Import Banks chief James Harmon claims:
The reality is that emerging economies do not need to go down a path of relying on fossil fuels. Just as many developing countries skipped land lines and went straight to cellular telephones, these countries can leapfrog right to affordable clean energy.
But unless poor people don’t need electricity at night or when the wind isn’t blowing, and unless they can afford high-priced electricity sources like wind and solar (which only exist in developed countries where they are significantly subsidized), then fossil fuels are not bypassable like land lines were.
Large industrial nations can’t bypass fossil fuels. Why would we expect Mozambique to do without them?
The alternatives to fossil fuels are hydro and nuclear electricty. Even then, you need transport fuels to move products from where they’re made to where they are needed. At this point, electricity is negligible as a transport energy source.
Mozambique and Mauritius and Mauritania may all have accessible methane under them — I dunno. But in recent years, fracking has found economically recoverable methane almost anywhere.
Well-planned refuse disposal can also produce methane but I dunno if it can produce methane in commercially feasible ways at this point. Methane is actually a renewable bio-fuel, more so than ethanol or methanol.