| Bill
Clinton’s speech at the Mansion House on Tuesday contained a number of useful
“sound bites”: one was the plea to “avoid false choices”.
The climate change debate is well known for many potentially false choices. Let
me highlight one of them. You
talk of livelihoods and climate change. But a major determinant of the sustainability
of the livelihoods of poor people will be their use of so-called “modern
energy services”.Without such improved energy services, productivity
remains low and sweat intensive, transport remains arduous and limited. No group
in modern history has got out of poverty without massively increased use of modern
energy services (though their total use of primary energy may fall). In most cases
these energy services for poor people (light, process heat, mobile and static
mechanical power) will be most easily supplied by fossil fuels. Many lobby groups
(and researchers?) seem intent on trying to stop poor people gaining accesses
to these technologies and fuels that we use (excessively) every day. The issue
is one of political economy. But
it is important to stress that if the modern energy service needs of all poor
people were met by fossil fuels it is now widely established that this would have
a negligible effect on global climate change (though it would massively reduce
localised pollution. This has been most eloquently stated in a recent key note
speech at The World Bank by Professor Robert Socolow, Center for Energy
and Environmental Studies, Princeton University. The
point is that it is not that poor people are short of inanimate energy
(“the sun shines doesn’t it”?), but that they are short of the
capital to convert energy into useful energy services. So it is no use (and
probably immoral) for the rich and powerful to compel the weak and poverty stricken
to restrict their choice of energy services to those that are associated with
high capital cost (such as non-biomass renewables – particularly PV).,
It remains
a surprise to me that none of the leading social science research institutes working
on development in the UK work on “energy” (though some work on oil).
IDS did some work on this subject in 2002/3 in a study on Energy
Poverty and Gender: as case study of China led by Dr Henry Lucas (See
PDF).
The main argument on this topic is covered on pages 29 – 31.
The
question now is who will now take this work forward! Will it be you?
Best wishes
and good luck Andrew
Barnett
Director
The Policy Practice Limited
33 Southdown Avenue
Brighton
BN1
6EH
UK
Phone: +44 (0)1273-330331
E-Mail: andrew.barnett@thepolicypractice.com
Web:
www.thepolicypractice.com | 
