One and half billion people – more than 1 out of every 5 people in the world – have no electricity [1] and the powers-that-be could care less. In fact, the powers-that-be don’t even care enough about one-fifth of the world lacking electricity to even make a phony promise that they’ll ever get electricity to those who need it. The United Nations calls their current phony promises “The Millennium Development Goals” or “MDG’s“. [2]
Getting electricity to those without it didn’t even make the list of these MDG’s. In their own words: “Unfortunately the international community has not taken this issue seriously enough to establish a specific target for energy services in the framework of the MDGs.” [3] Individual countries aren’t pretending to promise anything better either. “A large number of countries do not have energy access targets in place, particularly for those aspects of energy access that are most crucial for reducing poverty. . . few countries have targets for improving access to energy for meeting basic needs.” [4]
It’s hard for us lucky 78 percent of the world to even imagine what it’s like to live without electricity- without refrigeration of food or medicine, without light whenever you want it, without a million other things that you and I take for granted each day. And living without electricity is not just a mind-boggling inconvenience, it’s also a killer. When you have no electricity for cooking, heating, or light, you burn coal, wood, crop residues, and even dung to meet your basic energy needs – and this causes 2 million people to die unnecessarily each year due to inhaling the indoor smoke all this burning causes. [5] That’s more than 5,400 people who die every day, mostly women and children, because they didn’t have electricity – more than who died on 9/11 – and that’s each and every DAY, day after day. You can read more about this “killer in the kitchen” here: Fuel for Life, Household Energy and Health at http://www.who.int/indoorair/publications/fuelforlife.pdf (andArchived by WebCite® a thttp://www.webcitation.org/5nW0O1hg2, Accessed: 2010-02-13)
Why isn’t this making the front page of your newspaper? Why does the Lifetime television network, which supposedly advocates “a wide range of issues affecting women and their families” only show you a killer in the kitchen if he has a knife and one woman gets killed, and not inform you about the 5,400 people, mostly women and children, who die EACH DAY because they don’t have electricity and live like cavemen, surrounding a fire and inhaling billows of smoke into their lungs, just to cook?
Getting electricity to that portion of humanity without it needs to be one of the world’s top priorities. It needs to be done yesterday. Electricity will bring so much, in addition to preventing these needless smoke related deaths. There can be improved water supplies with the introduction of pumps powered by electricity, refrigeration of food and medicine, and of course computers and all the information they can bring. Should it really be only us who can have these things? We are our brothers’ keepers.
More on Electricity, the Energy Which Human Beings Need
How Much Would It Cost To Electrify the World? How much would it cost to get universal electricity access throughout the world? The only estimate I’ve found thus far is this, from the International Energy Agency:
“Expanding access to modern energy is a necessary condition for human development. With appropriate policies, universal electricity access could be achieved with additional annual investment worldwide of $35 billion (in year-2008 dollars) through to 2030”( [6]
The World Energy Council does not have any better estimates as to the cost to electrify the world. “WEC has not produced any recent estimates but our earlier projections were in line with the ones by IEA you are quoting in your message. However, there is a huge degree of uncertainty in these numbers, as no one really knows today how many people lack access to electricity. The figures of 1.4 to 2 billion are also best estimates.”, from the World Energy Council’s Director of Programmes’ 2/21/10 private email to this author, full text available upon request to Angie@WhatNewShouldBe.org. Just like thepowers-that-be have not seen fit to accurately count how many people live and die in this world and of what causes (see http://WhatNewsShouldBe.com/id22.html, the number of those human beings forced to live without electricity are not accurately counted either.)
$35 billion over the course of 22 years is $770 billion. With the stroke of a pen, the United States gave $700 billion dollars in one fell swoop to bailout Wall Street[7], not to rescue humanity from unnecessary death and suffering caused by having to live without electricity. When will the life and death needs of humanity trump those of the bankers? At the time of this article, the monetary cost of the war on Iraq to the U.S. has been $725 billion dollars so far, and if you add in Obama’s war on Afghanistan, it’s more than a trillion dollars (see http://www.costofwar.com/ accessed 5/30/10). When will the life and death needs of humanity trump the warmongers who just cause more death and destruction?
The International Energy Agency admits that if we rely on our capitalist systems and the markets, universal energy access will NEVER happen:
“The task of achieving universal access to electricity is, clearly, formidable but it would contribute substantially to the alleviation of poverty. The required investment is most unlikely to be driven by the private sector, as in those countries in which electricity access is the lowest there is often no market and there are no guarantees . . . Providing full access means providing electricity to those who are so poor that they have no means to pay. For these people, the only solution is for the service to be provided by governments or the international community as an investment in future social and income benefits”. [8]
This is just another example of how Capitalism and the markets don’t work for humanity. (See also my page on Obstacles Facing Humanity, subpage Capitalism, coming soon). We need a better way.
The “Global Warming” Energy Distraction – News of energy is often in the mainstream news these days, except it’s not about getting energy (electricity) to those with none, it’s all about persuading us that we need to switch to more expensive alternative energies, “renewable” and clean “green” energies. Rather than being about the needless deaths the lack of energy is causing each and every day in the present (5,400 each day, see above), and our need to get energy to people without it in the quickest (and thus cheapest) ways possible, the front page news stories are about the speculative, theoretical, future harm that the continued use of the cheapest traditional fossil fuels used to generate electricity – like oil, coal, and gas – could cause if theglobal warming theory proved to be correct. Traditional fossil fuels release “C02” into the air (carbon dioxide, you know, the same gas which we all exhale, and which plants “breath” in), and the global warming theory speculates that the more C02 released into the air, the hotter the earth will become, and that a hotter earth will be a more dangerous one. This theory, however, has not held up to real world data, and has proven to be false. To see how so many got this so wrong, see, http://wnshouldbe.mayfirst.org/?p=138. This global warming bogus theory is simply a weapon of mass distraction, distracting us from the present day pressing need to get energy to the 22 percent of humanity still forced to live without it as fast as we possibly can, without wasting any energy, pun intended, or time on first inventing new alternative and expensive energies on a mass scale. (And if you’re too hard headed to accept that the ‘global warming theory’ is bogus in spite of the evidence, at least let me put your mind to rest and advise you that even if all of humanity had electricity, “the accompanying increase in primary energy demand and CO2 emissions would be very modest” [9]. Some of the global warming clueless and heartless have even gone so far as to assert “that having 1.5 billion people without electricity is a good thing as this prevents the further release of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere”, but experts “dismiss this outright, insisting that expanding electricity access to this segment, even with fossil-fuel-based sources, would have only a minuscule impact on global warming. ‘We have calculated that if all these people would have electricity access — that is, universal electricity access throughout the world — global CO2 emissions will increase only 0.9 percent, which is peanuts’”. [10]
Be Careful What You Wish For – Alternative Energies – A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
The Clean Energy Scam – A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY: Although getting electrical energy to those without it should be humanity’s energy focus, the bogus global warming theory, as indicated above, puts the focus instead on creating alternative energies which would allegedly release less of the supposedly dangerous carbon dioxide into the air than traditional fuels do. In March of 2008, Time Magazine published an exposé on one of these alternative energies, biofuels, entitled “The Clean Energy Scam” [11], after it was shown that not only do biofuels NOT release less carbon dioxide, their use also caused food riots around the world. The article reviewed why biofuels became so popular, big business in fact, and what was later revealed about their effects. Once upon a time,
“[p]ropelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels became the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they’re serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. TheU.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels had become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.”
And then most of the world (that portion which didn’t have a financial stake or tie to biofuels, that is) realized that not only did biofuels not reduce the amount of (the allegedly dangerous) carbon dioxide in the environment, they actually increased it, and by using land which had previously been used for food crops for biofuels, food prices increased through the roof and food security for millions of human beings was lost.
“[B]y diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry.” . . . no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. . . . Not every kernel of corn diverted to fuel will be replaced. Diversions raise food prices, so the poor will eat less. That’s the reason a U.N. food expert recently called agrofuels a “crime against humanity.” . . .Four years ago, two University of Minnesota researchers predicted the ranks of the hungry would drop to 625 million by 2025; last year, after adjusting for the inflationary effects of biofuels, they increased their prediction to 1.2 billion. . . .But the world is still going to be fighting an uphill battle until it realizes that right now, biofuels aren’t part of the solution at all. They’re part of the problem.”
From Time Magazine’s article “The Clean Energy Scam”, 3/28/08, at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html, also archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5nbOvka0p
Other Inconvenient Truths About Alternative Energies
“Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.
Source: Alternative Energy Projects Stumble on a Need for Water, New York Times, 9/30/09
Address : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/business/energy-environment/30water.html?_r=1&em(Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/5nbPINpQY )
Tiny Tidbits
My Endorsement of the Global Energy Grid by Walter Cronkite
In 2008, non-renewable sources of energy accounted for about 92.7% of total U.S. energy consumption.
Renewable & Alternative Fuels FAQs – Energy Information Administration
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ask/Renewables_FAQs.asp#market_share and Archived by WebCite® athttp://www.webcitation.org/5nW2sFE03Accessed: 2010-02-13
Solutions to getting electricity or electrical devices to those without it:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/lighting-up-the-darkness/?hp
“A new technique that tapped previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas in the United States is spreading to the rest of the world, raising hopes of a huge expansion in global reserves of the cleanest fossil fuel.”
Gas Extraction Method Could Greatly Increase Global Supplies – NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/business/energy-environment/10gas.html
Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5q65yhImH
“Beyond curbing respiratory problems, a more secure household energy situation enables water to be boiled and thus helps reduce the incidence of water-borne diseases.” http://www.who.int/indoorair/publications/fuelforlife.pdf
FOOTNOTES
- [1] “We estimate that 1.5 billion people still lack access to electricity — well over one-fifth of the world’s population.” The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2009 publication, Executive Summary, p. 7,http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2009/WEO2009_es_english.pdf(Accessed: 2010-01-24 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5n1qDSujU). See also p. 128 of the full 2009 publication, not online, but available in libraries (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/460061910&referer=brief_results) or for purchase (at http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/add.aspx?id=388 for approximately $163 or 120 Euros).
See also p. 10 of the November 2009 joint report of the United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization entitled “The Energy Access Situation in Developing Countries: A Review Focusing on the Least Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa”,
http://content.undp.org/go/cms-service/stream/asset/?asset_id=2205620(Accessed: 2010-01-24 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5n1qSvLpn ).
Population of the world is currently around 6.8 billion people: http://www.worldometers.info/population/and http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html Both accessed: 2010-02-11.
*Realize that the statistic on how many are forced to live without electricity is a very rough guess. “(T)here is a huge degree of uncertainty in these numbers, as no one really knows today how many people lack access to electricity. The figures of 1.4 to 2 billion are also best estimates.”, from the World Energy Council’s Director of Programmes’ 2/21/10 private email to this author, full text available upon request to Angie@WhatNewShouldBe.org. The powers-that-be haven’t seen fit to count even how many human beings live and die, and of what causes (see http://www.whatnewsshouldbe.com/id22.html ), so the failure to accurately count those living without electricity should not be a surprise either.↩
- [2]See, Current Bogus Problems to Help Humanity at http://whatnewsshouldbe.com/id20.html
And to see a comparison of the bogus promises of the past to help humanity and the bogus promises of the present, see this page.) ↩
- [3]See http://web.archive.org/web/20061006211258/ and http://www2.undp.org.yu/files/news/20041119_energy_poverty.pdf Accessed: 2010-01-24. (Archive at http://www.webcitation.org/5n1p1twA3); See also: “(w)hile there is no MDG on energy, the global aspirations embodied in the goals will not become a reality without massive increases in the quantity and quality of energy services. This is needed to meet the most basic needs of poor men and women, especially heat for cooking, and mechanical power.” From Foreword to November 2009 joint report of the United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization entitled “The Energy Access Situation in Developing Countries: A Review Focusing on the Least Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa”, http://content.undp.org/go/cms-service/stream/asset/?asset_id=2205620 Accessed: 2010-01-24. Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5n1qSvLpn↩
- [4]Page 34 of the November 2009 joint report of the United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization entitled “The Energy Access Situation in Developing Countries: A Review Focusing on the Least Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa”, http://content.undp.org/go/cms-service/stream/asset/?asset_id=2205620 Accessed: 2010-01-24. Archived at http:/www.webcitation.org/5n1qSvLpn↩
- [5]Pages 22-28 of the November 2009 joint report of the United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization entitled “The Energy Access Situation in Developing Countries: A Review Focusing on the Least Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa”,http://content.undp.org/go/cms-service/stream/asset/?asset_id=2205620Accessed: 2010-01-24 and Archived athttp:/www.webcitation.org/5n1qSvLpn↩
- [6]The International Energy Agency’sWorld Energy Outlook 2009 publication, Executive Summary, p. 7, http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2009/WEO2009_es_english.pdf(Accessed: 2010-01-24 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5n1qDSujU). See also p. 132 -134 of the full 2009 publication, not online for free, but available in libraries (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/460061910&referer=brief_results) or for purchase (at http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/add.aspx?id=388for approximately $163 or 120 Euros). ↩
- [7]“Bush signs $700 billion financial bailout bill – President promises quick but ‘deliberative’ action to rescue Wall Street”, at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26987291/ (Accessed: 2010-02-13 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5nWAV4SK8↩
- [8]The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2009 publication, p. 133, not available online for free, but available in libraries (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/460061910&referer=brief_results) or for purchase (at http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/add.aspx?id=388 for approximately $163 or 120 Euros), but not online for free.) ↩
- [9]The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2009 publication, Executive Summary, p. 7, http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2009/WEO2009_es_english.pdf (Accessed: 2010-01-24 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5n1qDSujU). See also p. 133 of the full 2009 publication, not online for free, but available in libraries (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/460061910&referer=brief_results) or for purchase (at http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/add.aspx?id=388 for approximately $163 or120 Euros).The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2009 publication, Executive Summary, p. 7, http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2009/WEO2009_es_english.pdf (Accessed: 2010-01-24 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5n1qDSujU). See also p. 133 of the full 2009 publication, not online for free, but available in libraries (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/460061910&referer=brief_results) or for purchase (at http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/add.aspx?id=388 for approximately $163 or 120 Euros). ↩
- [10]“One-Quarter of World’s Population Lacks Electricity”: Scientific American, November 24, 2009
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=electricity-gap-developing-countries-energy-wood-charcoal&page=2 (Accessed: 2010-02-13 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5nW5hpW9y )↩ - [11]Time Magazine’s article “The Clean Energy Scam”, 3/28/08, athttp://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html, also archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5nbOvka0p↩