Energy poverty

Currently watching: "Syriana" (2005).

Bryan Woodman: What are they thinking? They're thinking that it's running out. It's running out, and 90% of what's left is in the Middle East. Look at the progression: Versailles, Suez, 1973, Gulf War 1, Gulf War 2. This is a fight to the death. So what are they thinking? 'Great!' They're thinking 'keep playing, keep buying yourself new toys, keep spending $50,000 a night on your hotel room, but don't invest in your infrastructure, don't build a real economy.' So that when you finally wake up, they will have sucked you dry, and you will have squandered the greatest natural resource in history.

Much of the goings-on in this still-prescient film concern the poverty in the Middle East, which, the film implicitly claims, fosters religious zealotry, extremism and cultural animosity towards the West. This is just one very specific kind of energy poverty, the kind where the US spends $1 billion daily on Middle Eastern oil, and that money doesn't go to building governments and societies, but goes to the petro-dictators for their own consumption. While the West frets over future, and legitimate, dangers of rising sea levels and prolonged droughts due to global warming, citizens of these petro-dictatorships are already suffering the full list of symptoms of the global carbon addiction.

But that's not the only type of energy poverty. Teryn Norris, president of Americans for Energy Leadership, recently reported:

Nearly 1.6 billion of our fellow human beings have no access to electricity, and around 2.4 billion people -- over one third of global population -- meet their basic cooking and heating needs by burning biomass, such as wood, crop waste, and dung. "Without access to modern, commercial energy, poor countries can be trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, social instability, and underdevelopment," concludes the International Energy Agency.

This type of unacceptable poverty exists in countries with and without the cursed luxury of global oil deposits. While rich countries in the West (and the East) can afford to pay a little more for cleaner energy, poor nations must resort to only the most primitive energy sources for their energy needs. This is a problem that will not be fixed solely by individual countries pricing carbon and deploying more clean energy infrastructure. There must also be a sustained global effort in buying down the cost of clean energy, so that it does not become another luxury of the rich world when we run out of oil.

The benefits of clean energy technology are numerous. It can foster economic development in poor nations and provide alternatives to dirty, inefficient biomass sources for heating and cooking. But not yet. The ability of cleantech to help lift billions of people out of poverty, and to put an end to the clout of petro-dictators, must be a part of the conversation