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As Europe endures record-breaking summer temperatures, ASHRAF PATEL argues that climate disasters cannot be separated from fossil-fuel profits, extractive investment in Africa and an unequal global energy system.
Something happened on the way to green decarbonisation heaven.
As Europe faces its highest summer temperatures, with scores of tragic climate-induced deaths, the de facto global green champion faces its moment of truth.
At last year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP30), hosted in Belém, Brazil, many EU nations reduced their commitments to their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) obligations. NDCs are individual climate action plans submitted by countries under the Paris Agreement to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Leading scientists have long drawn a link between climate change and heatwaves, which have reached astronomical proportions. In Europe, few countries have escaped the devastating effects of soaring temperatures. Having scorched western Europe, the heatwave moved across the central and eastern parts of the continent.
Authorities have reported highway damage and widespread train cancellations as temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius. Sections of Germany’s famous autobahn burst apart because of the intense heat, forcing closures.
In France, hospitals remained under intense pressure in the face of heat-related emergencies, including heart attacks, heatstroke, dehydration and heat-related fatalities, leading to more than a thousand deaths. Three-quarters of France, encompassing tens of millions of people, were placed under red alert for extreme heat last Thursday and Friday as the mercury topped 40 degrees Celsius in some locations, including Paris.
Britons struggled to cope last week as the record June temperature was broken three days in a row. Friday was confirmed as the country’s hottest June day on record.
All this comes against the backdrop of Europe’s energy giants’ oil and gas extractive investments reaching all-time highs.
As Shell announced bumper first-quarter profits of US$6.9 billion, new analysis from Global Witness revealed that six of Europe’s leading oil majors – BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, Eni, Equinor and Repsol – recorded the highest quarterly profits since 2022, when they reaped the benefits of the fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine:
‘In the first quarter of 2026, the combined US$21.7 billion in quarterly profits recorded by BP, Repsol, TotalEnergies, Eni and Equinor was 43 per cent higher than the same period last year, reflecting a significant windfall from volatile oil prices caused by the US-Israel war in Iran.’
According to Global Witness’s analysis of quarterly filings, these six fossil fuel giants have not collectively generated this much money since the fourth quarter of 2022. The three biggest European majors – Shell, BP and TotalEnergies – have earned US$252 billion since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Energy transition, a term coined by the German Öko-Institut in 1980 to describe the transition from fossil fuel-based energy systems to green energy systems, is now a global buzzword, with many countries ‘modifying their legislation and redesigning their energy schemes to speed up the transition’.
The great Just Energy Transition was a narrative born in Europe, and its model has been exported across the world. But that narrative is now in tatters.
Extraction from Africa amid resource conflicts and critical mineral extraction
The great irony is that energy and critical mineral extraction continues amid widespread energy poverty, reflecting the unequal patterns of global trade and investment.
Africa, with 18 per cent of the world’s population, consumes only three per cent of global electricity and has the lowest per capita emissions of any region. Furthermore, nearly 40 per cent of its population lacks adequate access to energy, while about 900 million people – 80 per cent of families – lack access to clean cooking facilities.
InfluenceMap analysed climate policy engagement activities undertaken by 15 European oil, gas and utility companies that have proposed or begun constructing new LNG export terminals in Africa and import terminals in the European Union, as of May 2023, as identified by Global Energy Monitor.
The companies assessed were BP, E.ON, Enagás, Enel, Engie, Eni, Equinor, Fluxys, GALP, Gasunie, PGNiG, RWE, Shell, Snam and TotalEnergies.
The report identified three distinct phases of this advocacy and narrative capture:
- promoting gas exploration and LNG infrastructure in Africa;
- advocating LNG importation and transportation in Europe; and
- weakening several EU climate policies that would reduce gas demand within the bloc.
In total, 13 companies were found to be directly engaged in at least one aspect of these international advocacy efforts.
The annual AU-EU Summits have increasingly come to focus on energy investments. Another important dimension of AU-EU partnerships has been the EU-Africa Action supporting the Africa Single Electricity Market (AfSEM), the Continental Master Plan (CMP), investment and capacity-building initiatives, green energy and digitalisation.
According to the EU:
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‘2025 represents a key opportunity for the two continents to deepen cooperation on energy, given the start of a new EU-AU policy and programming cycle, and preparation for the AU Energy Summit, the International Conference on Financing for Development, and the Seventh AU-EU Summit, combined with the South African Presidency of the G20 and its lessons on the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP). Beyond this, 2025 also marked the second year of the AU’s Agenda 2063 Second Ten-Year Implementation Plan (STYIP) and one year since the AU joined the G20.’
This energy investment model in Africa is generally one of extraction and profit. Coupled with new development aid cuts, Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) trade barriers, supply-chain diversification strategies and new critical minerals strategies pursued by the major powers, Africa remains at the bottom of the global energy-industrial value chain.
Furthermore, the new hydrogen economy’s extractive model is already under way in Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa, with these countries becoming sites of expensive experimentation. In an age of unfair trade and new ‘green trade barriers’, the EU’s CBAM system creates additional challenges for African exporters, thereby constraining industrial development and, in effect, ‘kicking away the ladder’ to national developmental pathways.
This is particularly ironic given that South Africa’s G20 Presidency in 2025 made significant commitments on climate change, artificial intelligence, critical minerals and sustainable industrial development.
Hence, the EU’s current energy-extractive investment model deepens the twin crises of extractivism and deindustrialisation. We are witnessing profoundly unjust energy futures with serious implications for both African and European citizens, while the profits of major oil corporations continue to reach stratospheric levels amid price gouging in both Europe and the United States.
One of the more cynical developments has been the EU’s retreat from its commitments under successive UN climate conferences and its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Coupled with major development aid cuts and increased military expenditure across the bloc, the EU’s energy-extractive investment model is likely to deepen the climate crisis rather than mitigate it.
Climate emergencies and heatwaves have demonstrated that there are no silos or fortresses within the global trade and energy-extractive complex. If anything, climate science has shown that we truly inhabit one interconnected planet. Continued fossil-fuel extraction, together with unfair and unsustainable trade and investment models imposed on the Global South, will ultimately ‘blow back’ on the Global North.
In an age of polycrisis, multiple wars and intensifying competition over strategic minerals, the European Union needs to recalibrate its engagement with the wider world, particularly with Africa and the Global South.
Another EU alternative must be possible in an age of polycrisis.
Ashraf Patel is a senior research associate at the Institute for Global Dialogue (IGD) in South Africa, specialising in global governance, multilateralism, the political economy of the Global South, and developmental and climate justice.
