Developing countries have the opportunity to leapfrog the west in economic development, if they go straight to clean technology while rich countries struggle to wean themselves off fossil fuels, president Francois Hollande of France said on Wednesday. “They are going to be skipping the stage where industrialised countries were stopped fro a long time, for many decades,” he said. “We were dependent on fossil fuel, which means we now have to concentrate on the transition in the medium to long term of abandoning fossil fuels. But they have the chance to move immediately to the new technologies.” He said clean technologies such as renewable energy were “dropping in price and will continue to drop”, while industrialised countries faced costs in having to scrap old infrastructure and rebuild it anew in a low-carbon fashion. Developing countries, many of which are constructing scores of new cities to house their burgeoning populations, would be able to build them in a low-carbon way, with better energy efficiency, he told the annual meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, in Paris. “In the old world, we are proud of our old cities, but [they are very inefficient],” he said. “But countries starting on the path of industrialisation can immediately go to new building [technology].” He compared the opportunity with the mobile phone revolution in Africa, whereby as mobile phone technology dropped in price and became widely available all over the continent, there was little incentive to build conventional fixed line phones. “The digital revolution and the energy revolution will go hand in hand as in a sense we are talking about the same revolution,” he said.
