For Energy, Poor People Deserve To Be Rich
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Dec 22, 2019,07:03pm EST
This article is more than 3 years old.
There’s a global calamity that just isn’t hitting home here in the wealthy and healthy West.
And that’s a very sad truth: six in every seven humans today live in still developing nations.
This means that the vast majority of the world doesn’t make enough money and lacks adequate access to the modern energy that made us rich.
Our short sightedness comes from never having to see it.
Think about it: over three billion humans still use biomass for home heating and cooking, an indoor pollution that kills over four million people a year.
I’ve spent my 15-year career studying this reality, and I can assure you one very sad thing: poverty and energy poverty are increasingly a global afterthought by those of us lucky enough to live in the fully developed OECD world.
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To illustrate, an “environmental writer” at The Guardian, just called out “richer” Brazil, India, and China for blocking the Madrid climate talks.
Huh?
Just consider India, which has almost 15 million homes without access to electricity, 70% of its population depending on biomass for energy, an electricity usage rate that the U.S. had in the 1930s, and an annual GDP per Capita of just $2,300 (versus $38,000 in Europe)
My gosh, if that’s considered “rich,” we can only imagine what she deems “poor.”
And by the way, of the little electricity that India is able to generate, over 70% of it comes from coal, that very same coal that sparked the West’s rise to once unimaginable electricity heights.
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What this all inevitably means is that the world will be using more energy, much more energy, in the decades ahead.
This will happen until at least the poor nations catch up to the living standards of the European Union, the U.S., Japan, and the other rich OECD nations.
That progress is going to take a lot longer than some Westerners want to realize.
But it must happen: Paris is no more important than Lagos; New York no more important than Karachi; Madrid no more important than Mumbai.
The world’s economy will about double and add $85 trillion in real GDP by 2050.
Indeed, this simple reality of more money is combining with the other base factor that surges energy consumption: more people.
By 2050, the world will add another 2.5 billion people to surpass 10.3 billion.
Another 125 New York City’s worth of humans added to planet Earth over the next three decades.
And most of this will be urban growth, cities especially giving more people more money and access to consume.
The majority of this huge expansion will occur in Africa, where some of the poorest nations in the world have more children.
Many hugely populated African countries have fertility rates two, three, or four times higher than those in the West.
That’s because children in such energy-deprived nations are essential in helping out with mundane chores that we conquered centuries ago, like collecting biomass for fuel.
And unimaginably hard lives have them perishing far before their time.
Every day, an average of 15,000 children under age five die from preventable causes, enabled by an abject poverty that is enabled by a lack of modern energy.
There’s this constant of “more people, making more money, using more energy.”
The energy required for cooling in sweltering “megacities” in the still developing world alone is immense: "Global Warming," More Air Conditioning, and More Energy.”
This all explains why the even the agreed upon Paris Agreement and the recent Madrid COP25 climate conference have been deemed failures.
The world’s poor are tired of being forgotten, and have another quietly looming crisis that necessitates affordable energy: “World Bank warns massive debt wave could crash on developing countries.”
The leadership of the poor nations fully realizes that eradicating poverty and energy deprivation is their highest duty: “A Better Word of the Year for 2019: Energy Poverty.”
In other words, know this as we head into 2020.
Don’t set purity tests that you yourself cannot pass.
All energy sources will have a major role to play; they get evaluated on their cost and technical limits and advantages in the countries whose incremental demand matters the most.
Today’s world is far too poor and energy short for it to be any other way: “EIA projects global energy-related CO2 emissions will increase through 2050.”
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I am Principal at JTC Energy Research Associates, LLC. I hold a B.A. in International Relations from Penn State University, with a minor in Statistical Analysis. I got my M.S. in Homeland Security from San Diego State University, with a focus on Energy Security, and an MBA from St. Francis University, with a focus on Energy Economics. My research specialization includes North American and international trends in liquid fuels, natural gas, coal, renewables, electricity and GHG emissions – and their connection to human development. I have over 400 professional publications in a variety of energy-related media, notably Pipeline & Gas Journal, Carbon Capture Journal, Journal of Energy Security, Power, World Oil, Public Utilities Fortnightly, and the Journal of Energy and Development. I have also been a writer and editor for reports commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, International Energy Agency, and other major energy research organizations.
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