Electrify Everything for Sure - But Start with Those With Hardly Any Energy
I’m on the run in New York City, speaking Friday at a NYU festival of ideas with Jonathan Watts and Genevieve Guenther on the complex life and lessons of James Lovelock - the Gaia pioneer and inventor of devices that helped reveal the CFC threat to the ozone layer (and also IRA bombs!). Read Watts’s biography of Lovelock!
But in this energy-abundant city, I’m thinking about energy paucity as well.
I shot this video of a migrant worker in rural central India cooking on an open fire doing reporting in 2017 for a ProPublica package on “clean” cooking challenges.
That trip reinforced for me the raw reality of energy poverty I’d already seen deep in the Amazon rain forest in 1989 and in the informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya in 2016:
It’s these experiences that prompt me to encourage you to read and share these essential
posts on energy abundance as a prime imperative for development (and subscribe to his ):
After you explore, listen to former President Biden’s climate envoy Jon Kerry speaking at a summit with African business leaders in 2021. It’s one of the worst examples of colonialist thinking I’ve ever encountered - essentially telling countries with tiny greenhouse-gase footprints that industralized nations had our fossil fuel party; it was a mistake; don’t repeat our mistake.
He actually says: "Just because some people didn't have their chance to make those mistakes doesn't mean they ought to go do it now…. The Earth doesn’t have the carbon space right now….”
Finally, watch my revealing discussion exploring Why Climate Justice Must Include Energy Justice.
When you start from anything but reduce net CO2 emissions at as low cost as possible, you will wind up with absurdities.
Poor African countries and rich North American countries should invest in energy according to cost benefit analysis, yes including an adjustment for the cost of CO2 emissions that on the margin will shift choices away from fossil fuels (and away from Coal more than away from gas), but at the end of the day, that is just one factor. It definitely does NOT mean zero CO2 emissions or nothing.