Powering the Fight Against Poverty
For years, I took energy for granted. There’s no telling how many times I walked into my office, flipped a light switch, and powered up a PC without thinking at all about the magic of getting electricity any time I wanted it. But then I started traveling to poor and middle-income countries, and I had a very different experience.
I remember going to Buenos Aires and seeing where the government had run big wires to distribute electricity. But people couldn’t afford it, so they tapped their own power cables into the government’s and stole the electricity. This is a very common experience—according to the United Nations, some 1.4 billion people have no access to electricity, and a billion more only have access to unreliable electricity networks. I’ve talked to women in rural Africa who spent hours every day hauling wood so they could cook food and light their homes. Others buy fuel to run a generator, which pumps out pollutants that cause asthma and lung cancer and, at 25 cents per kilowatt-hour, is more than twice as expensive as what the average American homeowner pays for electricity. Another example of the high cost of being poor.
Here is a picture of some students in Conakry, Guinea. They’re studying under street lamps, because they don’t have reliable lights at home. This is one of the most vivid examples of life without electricity at home that I’ve seen....MORETwo Videos That Illuminate Energy Poverty
Many developing countries are turning to coal and other low-cost fossil fuels to generate the electricity they need for powering homes, industry, and agriculture. Some people in rich countries are telling them to cut back on fossil fuels. I understand the concern: After all, human beings are causing our climate to change, and our use of fossil fuels is a huge reason.We Need Energy Miracles
But even as we push to get serious about confronting climate change, we should not try to solve the problem on the backs of the poor. For one thing, poor countries represent a small part of the carbon-emissions problem. And they desperately need cheap sources of energy now to fuel the economic growth that lifts families out of poverty. They can’t afford today’s expensive clean energy solutions, and we can’t expect them wait for the technology to get cheaper.
Instead of putting constraints on poor countries that will hold back their ability to fight poverty, we should be investing dramatically more money in R&D to make fossil fuels cleaner and make clean energy cheaper than any fossil fuel....MORE
I often talk about the miracle of vaccines: With just a few doses, they protect children from deadly diseases forever.
When it comes to clean energy, we need breakthroughs that are just as miraculous.
Just like vaccines, clean-energy miracles don’t just happen by chance. We have to make them happen, through long-term investments in research and development. Unfortunately, right now neither the private sector nor the U.S. government is making anywhere near the scale of investment it takes to produce these breakthroughs.
Why are clean-energy breakthroughs so important? As I mentioned here, the world is going to need a lot more energy in the coming decades—an increase of 50 percent or more between 2010 and 2040, according to U.S. government estimates. But today our biggest sources of energy are also big sources of carbon dioxide, which is causing climate change....MORE
