Power for the people
You cannot champion the poor, but support anti-energy policies that perpetuate poverty
Guest post by Paul Driessen
In a scene reminiscent of Colonial Williamsburg, for 16 years Thabo Molubi and his partner had made furniture in South Africa’s outback, known locally as the “veld,” using nothing but hand and foot power. When an electrical line finally reached the area, they installed lights, power saws and drills. Their productivity increased fourfold, and they hired local workers to make, sell and ship far more tables and chairs of much higher quality, thereby also commanding higher prices.
Living standards soared, and local families were able to buy and enjoy lights, refrigerators, televisions, computers and other technologies that Americans and Europeans often take for granted. The area was propelled into the modern era, entrepreneurial spirits were unleashed, new businesses opened, and hundreds of newly employed workers joined the global economy.
People benefited even on the very edge of the newly electrified area. Bheki Vilakazi opened a small shop where people could charge their cell phones before heading into the veld, where instant communication can mean life or death in the event of an accident, automobile breakdown or encounter with wild animals.
Thousands of other African communities want the same opportunities. But for now they must continue to live without electricity, or have it only sporadically and unpredictably a few hours each week. Over 700 million Africans – and some two billion people worldwide – still lack regular, reliable electricity and must rely on toxic wood and dung fires for most or all of their heating and cooking needs.
Mothers with babies strapped on their backs must bend over open fires, breathing poisonous fumes and being struck down by debilitating, often fatal lung diseases. Homes, schools, shops and clinics lack the most rudimentary electrical necessities. Impoverished families must live in mud-and-thatch or cinderblock houses that allow mosquitoes to fly in, feast on human blood and infect victims with malaria. And parents and children must carry and drink untreated water that swarms with bacteria and parasites which cause cholera, diarrhea and river blindness. When the sun goes down, their lives shut down.
The environmental costs are equally high. In Rwanda gorilla habitats are being turned into charcoal, to fuel cooking fires. In Zambia, entrepreneurs harvest trees by the thousands along highways, selling them to motorists heading back to their non-electrified homes in rural areas and even parts of cities. As quickly as First World charities hold plant-a-tree days, Africans cut trees for essential cooking.
If eco-activists have their way, it will be like this for decades to come.
In his DotEarth blog for the New York Times, columnist Andrew Revkin lamented this intolerable situation. “Access to the benefits that come with ample energy trumps concerns about their tiny contribution of greenhouse gas emissions,” he wrote. But despite agreeing with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow on this central issue, Revkin took issue on several items.
CFACT’s “Stop energy poverty” slogan is clever, he wrote. But where are its “substantive proposals for getting affordable energy” to those who don’t have it? Africa sits on vast deposits of natural gas and liquid condensates. Perhaps CFACT could find a business model that can lead to capturing, instead of flaring, those “orphan fuels,” Revkin suggested, while wondering why the Committee offers solar ovens to a Yucatan village and uses its slogan in part to challenge global warming scares.
Converting orphan fuels to productive uses is a terrific idea. That’s why CFACT opposes restrictions on using these fuels and wants to help find investors and build local support for gas-fired power plants that can electrify and modernize homes and businesses, create jobs, improve health and living standards, purify water, and launch companies that can build modern homes. Non-orphan deposits of oil, “tight oil,” natural gas, shale gas and coal could do likewise.
Unconventional US shale gas reserves alone are now estimated at about 57 trillion cubic meters (2000 trillion cubic feet) – enough for 100 years at current US consumption rates, on top of conventional reserves. Africa almost certainly has large gas, oil, coal and uranium deposits of its own, lying untapped beneath numerous poor countries, waiting to fuel an economic boom – if environmentalists, self-interested companies and government agencies would stop using global warming and other scares to justify their opposition to large-scale generating plants.
Until then, the Committee will continue providing interim measures – solar ovens, used laptops and small solar-powered charging systems – while also training people in computer and business skills, and assisting Yucatan and Ugandan villagers with tree farm and other projects.
All these are akin to the help that first responders provide, before getting disaster victims to hospitals. They are important steps toward individual and community empowerment that comes from having property rights, free enterprise, and full access to modern technologies that improve, enhance and safeguard lives. But none of this is possible without reliable, affordable energy to power those technologies.
“If abundant, affordable, clean energy and water were readily available to everyone, all the other problems would become much easier to solve,” Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley observed. Of course, “clean” does not have to mean non-carbon dioxide emitting, though Mr. Revkin seems reluctant to support energy that comes from fossil fuels, notes CFACT executive director Craig Rucker. “However, you cannot champion the poor, while supporting policies that perpetuate poverty,” Rucker emphasizes.
Modern coal-fired power plants are far cleaner than their predecessors, posing few environmental or health problems, except in the minds and propaganda of eco-activists. They are infinitely cleaner than the open fires that provide pitiful, polluting, often deadly energy for the barest necessities. Gas-fired plants are cleaner still, and safe, modern nuclear plants could also support major economic booms.
To suggest that impoverished nations must worry more about CO2 than about tuberculosis, cholera or malaria is absurd. To tell them their energy options must be limited to expensive, unreliable, insufficient wind and solar power is immoral. To impose anti-hydrocarbon restrictions on poor countries ensures that they will remain poor and diseased, with life expectancies in the low forties.
As Dambisa Moyo and others suggest, it is time for rich Western nations to provide less aid, fewer restrictions – and much more trade, investment and banking expertise and opportunity; business, agricultural and property rights know-how; and energy technologies that will harness and utilize abundant, reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy. They also need to stop propagating scare stories and imposing restrictions on the use of hybrid and genetically modified seeds to reduce malnutrition, and insecticides to reduce disease.
CFACT’s goal is simple, says Rucker. “Give poor families, communities and nations the same opportunities we had, the same freedoms to chart their destinies, the same rights to create and manage their own wealth, develop their own free and healthy institutions, solve their own environmental and health challenges – and even make their own mistakes along the way.”
Brazil, China, India and Indonesia are not about to stop building new coal-fired power plants; nor are developed countries going to tear their plants down or abandon their fossil fuel-powered vehicles. Africa and other poor regions need to adopt the same attitude – and also seek investors and trade opportunities, rather than just more aid that is often merely life support for corrupt dictators and bureaucrats.
CFACT’s plan is also simple, Rucker adds. Help now with solar ovens, laptops and other first aid. Challenge and change harmful, immoral, lethal policies that limit access to energy and other modern technologies, hobble job creation, impair health and kill millions. And help persuade investors and Third World communities to provide the energy technologies that will make health and prosperity happen.
“We hope Andrew Revkin and millions of other caring people will join us in supporting a global energy quest that advances human progress, while limiting actual environmental risks.”
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But….what if you really want to perpetuate poverty and thus to get rid of a lot of those pesky third world inhabitants? which, btw, use to multiply their numbers exponentially while the decent and cool people of the first world have a reasonable and intelligent low birth rate.
Yes! Of course! It is and always has been the eco-activists who have caused poverty through restrictions on the burning of hydrocarbons. There was no poverty in the world until this global warming hysteria prevented the poor people from burning oil for electricity. Why these sinister eco-activists are at the root of all the worlds problems. If only more carbon would be released into the air, all would be better. And how about the idea that there may be other power sources besides hydrocarbons? Absurd. Everyone knows that technology does not advance and the way to prosperity today is the same way it was done 100 years ago.
Unfortunatelly, having access to electricity does not reduce fire wood burning for cooking / heating. It does reduce the dumping of old/used lead batteries used for watching the TV (recharged at the nearest town).,
Providing electricity is a matter of energy for lighting but also power for production. Without the second, development is slower but demonstration effect bigger, accelerating the migration to the cities.
Access to TV reduces reproduction rate.
Lady Life Grows: you of course have no evidence whatsoever to support the fallacious claims you made regarding fatalities from nuclear accidents. It must disappoint you greatly that every scientific review, particularly those with no connection to the industry, have found none of the effects you claim.
So, are you making these numbers up, or are you truly ignorant?
sceptical says:
April 2, 2011 at 7:29 pm
“Why these sinister eco-activists are at the root of all the worlds problems.”
By George, he’s got it!!
“If only more carbon would be released into the air, all would be better.”
If that carbon release is helping a poor family eat and stay warm, then yes all IS better (for them)…
BTW – I’m sure the climate elites and eco-activist nuts will be happy to do with less – AFTER those
vacationsconferences in Bali, Copenhagen, Cancun…[LOL]Frank K. “If that carbon release is helping a poor family eat and stay warm, then yes all IS better (for them)…”
Why is it better than a less expensive energy source which does not release carbon and does the same? Why is the release of carbon the important part?
Google “yellow journalism”. All the explanation needed. CO2 that is human caused is less than 2 molecules amid 99,998 other molecules, the vast majority being nitrogen and to a far lesser extent, oxygen, with less than 38 molecules of CO2. That less than 2 molecules of CO2 can have “forcing temperature effects” on 99,998 other molecules is quite absurd.
A nation, and our world, goes through “eras” — we were hunter-gatherers, and then agriculturalists. From there, we enter the industrial age of our society, and once we’ve outgrown that, we enter the service age.
Capitalism works — to a point. It’s excellent at jump-starting an industrial age, but it is not sustainable. People who quote America as being a powerful capitalist entity seem to disregard the fact that we’re only a few hundred years old, and our industrial age wasn’t that too long ago. We’ve reached the point where it’s time to shift towards environmentally sound development — not only for ourselves, but for everyone — in order to continue living in a viable world. It’s just that simple.
Unfortunately, not every nation develops at the same rate. Places in Africa like you’ve described are still in that “angricultural” era — and while capitalism can help get them started very quickly, it has an enormous, damaging footprint. It’s a difficult problem, one that both businessmen and eco-activitists need to work together on to help develop these regions while still protecting the environment.
Belarus got the majority of the fallout from Chernobyl. Poland and Germany, Bavaria the worst, were also affected and as this study shows, the effects were monitored on infant mortality.
http://www.alfred-koerblein.de/chernobyl/downloads/infantmortality.pdf
“The health effects reported here all show a temporal correlation with the radiation exposure from Chernobyl. According to conventional radiobiological knowledge, no teratogenic effects are expected to occur below a threshold does of about 100 mSv. Even in the most contaminated regions of Germany, however, the extra doses to the foetus were below 1 mSv in the first follow-up year. Therefore the results contradict the widely accepted concept of a threshold dose for radiation damage during foetal development.
..
“7 Discussion
A trend analysis finds significant increases of perinatal motality in Germany and Poland in 1987, the year following the Chernobyl accident. The monthly data exhibit a significant association between perinatal mortality and the delayed caesium concentration in pregnant women. In Poland, which experience a higher average fallout from Chernobyl than Germany, the increase of perinatal mortality in 1987, as well as the casesium effect on monthly infant mortality data, is greater than in Germany. No increase in 1987 is found in pernatal mortality data from England and Wales.
..
“In Bavaria, a significant drop in birth rate is observed in February 1987, nine months after the Chernobyl accident, which might well be the consequence of more spontaneous abortions. Similar decreases in birth rate were observed in several other European countries [4, 5, 6].”
If the “widely accepted concept of a threshold dose for radiation damage during foetal development” comes from the nuclear industries’ p.r. arms, such as the IAEA, then they are proved to be corrupt in their assembling of data. http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/HoloVsNoProb.html
See also: http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf
Governments employ pr people to set the scene for proposed actions which are then fed to a compliant MSM journos with bosses with vested interests, examples such as Iraq the most obvious, the Beeb in AGW well known here. The P.R. machinery of governments/nuclear arms industry is well developed through the U.N., the “widely-accepted” is the outcome of systematic deceit over decades. Not only downplaying the results of the detrimental health effects on the general population of producing nuclear weapons from these reactors, but in hiding among the deceit the results of their use. See the effects on infants health in Iraq from the use of depleted uranium of this industry’s prime motivation of power and control. Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo – if you think these were justified attacks by the West’s coalition forces, then you’ve bought into the P.R. which first demonises the victims to get your emotional backing for the mass murder.
Contrast the study on infant mortality done with integrity, with a typical example of manipulation from the nuclear vested interests – http://www.wonuc.org/xfiles/chern_02.html
We all need to use our own bog standard rational intelligence to untangle the truth from the lies here.
http://www.thewe.cc/weplanet/news/depleted_uranium_iraq_afghanistan_balkans.html
Nuclear energy produced now is heavily subsidised for this reason, it is neither clean nor cheap.
If thorium reactors do not have the downsides of current reactors and are really as cheap to produce and run as has been claimed, then the most obvious reason we are not all benefitting from this kind of nuclear power in our backyards is because the needs of the general population are not only not a priority, but as with electricity in Africa, a deliberate manipulation is in place to deprive all of us oiks access to the benefits of progress, the UK a prototype here in the West. And the P.R., the continual unneccessary rising cost of energy imposed on the population accompanied by the meme, ‘we all have to make sacrifices, share the hard times’, which of course doesn’t affect those organising the destruction of our freedom to live and live well. Difficult now to tell who originally began manipulating the other in promoting its ideology, the green environmentalists manipulating government and business or government and business manipulating the greens, certainly Maggie Thatcher used the Greens to achieve her aim of destroying the cheap coal industry and union power of the people in Britain.
@amicus curiae says: April 2, 2011 at 8:40 am
“claims re fires being toxic to cook on is crap!”
@dlr says:April 2, 2011 at 12:00 pm
“Oh come on. They can’t put the baby down even when they cook dinner? Give me a break. … This is a rhetoric, a blatant attempt to sway the emotions, not an attempt to persuade or inform.”
When I first saw these comments I just put them down to crass ignorance and decided to ignore them. But this is really too important not to challenge.
It seems clear that ‘amicus curiae’ and ‘dlr’ have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
I came back from a trip to India last week. Everywhere I went, in the countryside and even in the shanty towns, dung from cows and buffalos is collected together, part dried, rolled into a ‘sausage’ and sliced into ‘patties’ perhaps 6″ – 7″ diameter and half an inch thick. These are dried in the sun. They are then neatly stacked up to form a pile perhaps a yard and a half high. The whole is then coated with a nice ‘skin’ of fresh dung and allowed to dry (the walls sometimes artistically decorated) to provide protection from the monsoon rains. The piles are to be found just outside the huts or hovels that people live in. When required, the ‘patties’ are taken out and burned in a simple hearth inside the hut, to cook food or provide warmth on cold nights.
You can imagine the health implications of the entire process. You can imagine the flies, the vermin and the parasites. You can imagine the improvement in agricultural yields if the dung was used for fertiliser. You can imagine the improvement in the lives of the little kids you meet, desperate to improve their English, but who are unable to read in the dark.
No this isn’t a ‘rhetoric’, it is part of life (together with having to walk and carry water) for millions of people. Yes, they could be shown how to erect flues. Yes, they could have a nice sterile baby and cot to put baby down. Perhaps you geniuses should go to India and explain it all to them. But you should be deeply ashamed of these stupid jibes.
Myself, I would rather use my energies trying to assist in projects to give them affordable, reliable energy. (That certainly doesn’t mean windmills. Fortunately they have plenty of coal and gas).
It is also worth pointing out that it says little for the Indian Government (and for the rest of the so-called World Community), that after 64 years of Independence, with a fabulously rich ‘upper class’ and a burgeoning and affluent ‘middle class’, in a country which can afford a Billion Dollar space programme, that the World’s largest democracy still has these levels of deprivation. It is clear that all that wealth will eventually ‘trickle down’ as the economy grows.
But that’s if all the greenie Western governments and Charities, the World Bank and all the rest don’t manage to divert progress into fashionable eco-nonsense.
As Dr. Roy Spencer points out, the ‘War on Global Warming’ is, in fact, a war on the World’s poor.
dlr says:
April 2, 2011 at 12:00 pm
“Mothers with babies strapped on their backs must bend over open fires…”
Oh come on. They can’t put the baby down even when they cook dinner? Give me a break.
==================================
dlr, I live in South Africa, and can assure you that is precisely how it is!
Geoff Alder
Radiation provides an “insult” to the cellular repair systems. The result is heightened activity, and a sharp drop in cancer and allied ills. See the “hormesis” studies. Blasphemy and anathema to the medical orthodoxy and the Green-With-Fear crowd, tho’.
Fingers crossed, LPPhysics.com may begin licensing a design for mfr. of a small (tiny) non-thermal fusion reactor, about 5MW, costing <<$500,000 and output at <½¢/kwh within 5 yrs. Powerlessness will rapidly end.
Meantime, the Frac Gas resource pool just got a major shot in the arm. Algeria announced discoveries of about 25,000 TCF, enough for Europe for a millennium. It's everywhere!
oeman50 says:
April 2, 2011 at 2:08 pm
“amicus curiae says:
while I endorse giving them power, the claims re fires being toxic to cook on is crap!”
Did you realize many of the fires used for cooking in Africa are fueled by dung? Which makes you comment truly ironic.
———–
dried dung burns fairly clean, similar to peat I think?
again a couple( well say 10 tin cans) can make a rough but serviceable chimney.
and anyone thats copped a face full of smoke while out camping learns to keep out of the direct smoke.
apart from initial combustion, little smoke should emanate anyway
Africa is just celebrating “Earth Hour” 24/7/365 for their whole 40 year lifespan. Al Gore must be so proud. If they just bought some carbon offsets, the world would be perfect.
Well said. That people who live in poorer countries are denied the opportunities that provided the lives of the well of industrial nations is shameful. The leading nations could do much more for all mankind, but that does not fit in with the agenda of the influential classes who appear to think they represent the most moral of dimensions.
Driesser’s main point seems to be to cast me with those seeking a high carbon price (or any carbon cost for poor countries) as a route to limiting climate risk, which couldn’t be farther from reality: http://j.mp/DOTcfact . The closing line about joining their version of a global energy quest is amusing, considering that’s precisely what I proposed CFACT do. Here’s my take on an “energy quest” that works for the long haul: http://j.mp/eQuest . Finally, the selective quoting of the late chemistry Nobelist completely discounts his concerns about the risks from unabated CO2 emissions (video here): http://nyti.ms/g41bHc
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
We can all see the elephant in the room but none dare speak of it.
Brian H says:
April 3, 2011 at 4:53 am
“Radiation provides an “insult” to the cellular repair systems. The result is heightened activity”
Yeah right. UV exposure makes your skin healthier.
Do you really believe that?
Sarah Bonner says:
April 3, 2011 at 2:27 am
“A nation, and our world, goes through “eras” — we were hunter-gatherers, and then agriculturalists. From there, we enter the industrial age of our society, and once we’ve outgrown that, we enter the
serviceservant age.”Fixed that for ya!
The downside of capitalism is the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Let’s cut to the chase here, Revkin, The New York Slimes and the entire liberal cocktail party circuit do not care a wit for the poor people of Africa. Their demise whether it stems from various red genocides or religious warfare or disease and poverty plays into the Mathusian group-think so prevalent among the ‘educated’ and ‘intellectual’ class.
The poor people of Africa do not have champions and benefactors among the liberal greenies and fellow traveler progressives and socialists. They are simply neo-Comms, next-gen derivatives of the marxist communists that have caused such mayhem on the dark continent through the past 50 years. The cornerstone of their thinking is in societal planning, something that is artificial and un-natural, and inevitably leads to sacrifices made to further the greater good.
In truth, if it were left up to the ‘progressive’ socialists and its favored (D) political container, there wouldn’t be a single electrical outlet or automobile to be found on the continents of Africa and Asia except for the palaces and ‘government’ buildings of their handpicked puppets and warlords.
Andrew Revkin and his fellow travellers can best be described as eco-imperialists. From their perch of ultra-modern comfort and luxury provided, of course, by modern electrical generation, they declare that those struggling in poverty on the other side of the planet should be kept away from modern tools and technology. They want to keep the poor as some kind of living museum exhibit, and pretend that the world is a better place because of that.
Amicus curiae,
“dried dung burns fairly clean, similar to peat I think?”
Any organic matter, when it is burnt, emits particulates which are harmful to health. The WHO has suggested limits of about 5 microgrammes per cubic metre of PM2.5. In the UK the AQO for PM2.5 is set at 25 microgrammes per cubic metre. Even that cannot be achieved without substantial filters. PM2.5 is extremely damaging when inhaled over long periods of time because it can pass through the lungs and into the bloodstream.
In ‘Dreams of My Father,’ Obama recalls the impact on his eyes and lungs when entering a hut in Kenya that where they were cooking a meal on a dung fire. Needless to say, he didn’t overstay his welcome.
Dave Springer says:
April 3, 2011 at 7:42 am
“The downside of capitalism is the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.”
BS!!
The freer the economy, the more the money moves. See this post from Mark pPerry’s blog on a study of income mobility by the Mlps. Fed
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/03/significant-earnings-mobilty-between.html
particularly this table
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-v8zkKJ7uz1Q/TZJBYTAik4I/AAAAAAAAPIg/tc-qh4Xkcgk/s1600/quintiles.jpg
1. For American households that were in the lowest earnings quintile (bottom 20 percent) in 2001, only 56% of those households remained in that quintile in 2007, and 44 percent had moved to a higher quintile by 2007. Five percent of low-income households in 2001 had moved to one of the top two quintiles in just six years.
2. For those households that were in the highest earnings quintile (top 20 percent) in 2001, 34 percent had moved to a lower quintile by 2007, and 5 percent of those households had moved all the way to the bottom quintile.
3. For those households in the middle earnings quintile (middle 20 percent) in 2001, about one-third moved to a higher quintile by 2007, more than one-fourth moved to a lower quintile, and only 42 percent remained in the same quintile.
4. More than half of the households in the second, third, and fourth quintiles in 2001 moved to a different earnings quintiles by 2007 (see bottom row in chart).
There have been numerous iterations of this type of study going back almost half a century and they all show essentially the same thing, the main difference being that those with a longer period show even greater mobility.
If you review Forbes’s annual lists of the wealthiest people in the country, there is always significant turnover and usually only a minority are on the list on the basis of inherited wealth. Well within the span of my own lifetime most of the folks on the latest lists had less than exceptional wealth.
The only real way for wealth to be permanently concentrated is through the connivence and abetance of the political class and that has nothing to do with market economics.
Dave Wendt is exactly right. In the free market there is a constant “churn.” The result is steadily increasing national prosperity instead of an ossified class/caste system. The evidence is everywhere we look. A good starting point is free market South Korea versus Big Government North Korea. From there we can compare the “capitalist” [a Karl Marx term] free market U.S. to the suffocating, over-taxed, anti-democratic EU, where a vote never counts until the citizens get it right.
@ur momisugly Dave Springer says:
April 3, 2011 at 7:21 am
Brian H says:
April 3, 2011 at 4:53 am
“Radiation provides an “insult” to the cellular repair systems. The result is heightened activity”
Yeah right. UV exposure makes your skin healthier.
Just for the record, the body can not make vitamin D without UV exposure . . .
Ergosterol – Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaErgosterol a sterol, is a biological precursor (a provitamin) to vitamin D2. It is turned into viosterol by ultraviolet light, and is then converted into …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergosterol – Cached – Similar
It’s one of the most surprising & amazing things I learned as a student. . . . never forgot it.