Juno News - John Robson discusses his new documentary, ‘In The Dark： Senegal As A Case Study In Energy Poverty'

00:00:00.000 It must have been arduous making a documentary like this, a lot of work.

00:00:03.880 Talk a little bit about the process, if you wouldn't mind.

00:00:06.440 It certainly was an interesting adventure.

00:00:08.880 I mean, one of the issues, and we didn't really know going in,

00:00:11.660 is what the infrastructure in Senegal would be like.

00:00:14.520 And in fact, not surprisingly, in a couple of major urban centres on the coast,

00:00:19.160 it's pretty good.

00:00:20.280 But further inland, it's absolutely hopeless.

00:00:22.420 Something like half the population has quite literally no access to electricity.

00:00:26.100 And of course, they don't have blacktop highways and so forth.

00:00:29.860 So, and you were never sure if anything was going to work, but it was, you know, even

00:00:36.620 the difficulties were very revealing of the kind of conditions under which people are

00:00:39.780 living, not just in Senegal, of course, but in a great deal of what we call the third

00:00:44.100 world, particularly in Africa.

00:00:46.300 And it, so much of it comes down to the fact that they don't have reliable energy.

00:00:51.320 There aren't, there isn't machinery.

00:00:53.880 So much of the labor is done by hand.

00:00:56.700 There aren't, there isn't power in the hospitals.

00:00:59.160 if that's the right word for them. And there aren't schools with working lights and air

00:01:03.180 conditioning. And so this perpetuates this cycle of poverty and indeed in many cases of hopelessness.

00:01:08.800 And it's just so cruel that so many Western environmentalists who take absolutely for

00:01:14.200 granted all the amenities that come with a very high standard of living powered by reliable,

00:01:18.840 affordable energy would casually condemn these people to continue to live in those circumstances

00:01:23.940 without, in most cases, ever having gone and looked at the consequences of what they're doing.

00:01:29.160 Yeah, I'm reminded if you go back to Barack Obama's time in office where he would talk about climate change to the African people.

00:01:39.080 You can't have refrigeration, you can't have air conditioning here, you can't have cars and all these other toys because climate change.

00:01:51.940 And I don't remember them thinking that that was a very good thing to do.

00:01:55.860 you know here was somebody from the west trying to keep them down in a sense and it's it's a form

00:02:02.880 of green imperialism isn't it it absolutely is because you know we've got all this money and we

00:02:09.080 say oh tut tut tut we shall not lend it to you to build a natural gas power plant you must have

00:02:14.060 solar panels and now we did visit one village where they had a solar panel but they said you

00:02:18.960 know at night the lights just go off and they're trapped indoors we don't dare go outside because

00:02:23.080 the snakes and the scorpions and they don't have running water in their homes including

00:02:27.480 they don't have toilets in their homes so this is what their life is like whereas barack obama of

00:02:31.960 course flies around in airplanes and he has a mansion by the seaside and all the push-button

00:02:38.200 luxuries.

Juno News - October 15, 2025