A focus on climate change ignores energy poverty

The signing of the Paris agreement on climate change has focused too much attention on how individual countries will meet their obligations. Lost in the pursuit of emissions reductions, which involves either technology to reduce emissions from fossil fuel use or less fossil fuel use, has been attention to what the agreement means for the world’s poor. There is no commercially viable technology for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and most signatories to the Paris agreement are pursuing policies to suppress fossil fuel use. This creates major problems for alleviating global poverty.

{mosads}Energy poverty refers to people who lack access to commercial energy. According to the International Energy Agency, “Modern energy services are crucial to human well-being and to a country’s economic development; and yet globally 1.2 billion people are without access to electricity and more than 2.7 billion people are without clean cooking facilities.” Without access to electricity, people lack lighting and refrigeration to protect some food and medicine. Without adequate cooking facilities, these 2.7 billion must rely on biomass and dung that exposes them to unhealthy levels of air pollution.

The lack of potable water, sanitary living conditions and the other benefits from access to commercial energy have created a situation where almost 3 billion people have very high mortality rates, especially among infants, and high rates of disease. According to an announcement of a debate held May 24 at the Brookings Institution, “Pollution from traditional sources such as biomass … causes respiratory diseases that kill over 3.5 million people each year, more than double the annual deaths attributed to malaria.”

As energy is made more scarce as a result of the Paris agreement and related actions to suppress fossil fuel use, the cost of energy to the world’s least well-off will be higher, making their problems greater. There is an abundance of historical data demonstrating the close relationship between energy, gross domestic product and price levels. If the current economic malaise continues, developed countries will be constrained in what they can do to help the energy poor and it will be harder for them to improve their standard of living.

While there are a number of reasons for such low and abnormal economic growth, the focus on replacing fossil fuels with energy sources that are not commercially viable in spite of large subsidies is a contributing factor. Rachel Kyte, a former vice president of the World Bank, made this point about affordable and abundant energy: “Access to energy is absolutely fundamental in the struggle against poverty. It is energy that lights the lamp that lets you do your homework, that keeps the heat on in a hospital, that lights the small businesses where most people work. Without energy, there is no economic growth, there is no dynamism, and there is no opportunity.” Making conventional energy more scarce and more expensive exacerbates this problem.

In 2000, the United Nations launched the Millennium Challenge to reduce global poverty by 50 percent from 1990 levels by 2015. A 2013 National Geographic article documents the failure of this initiative and paints a very grim outlook for those who are deprived of access to basic sources of energy. The article, “Five Surprising Facts About Energy Poverty,” refers a 2013 World Bank report and states, “Unless the world addresses the widespread problem of energy poverty, the World Bank said, other efforts at economic development are likely to fall short.” The article also noted that although “electricity has been extended to 1.7 billion more people between 1990 and 2010,” “estimates of the number of people without electricity have barely changed for years.”

The continued debate over carbon dioxide emissions and whether climate science is settled diverts attention and resources from addressing the serious energy poverty problem that we know how to solve: getting adequate and affordable energy to the world’s least well-off and helping them improve their standard of living.

O’Keefe is president of Solutions Consulting.