Energy poverty persists in rural India
Sagar told Earth & Sky that an estimated 70% of India’s population lives in rural areas. Most of them lack access to clean, efficient energy systems. They burn hand-gathered solid fuels like wood and dung for indoor cooking. This way of producing energy is known to cause health issues. (Credit: World Resources Institute Staff) Some rights reserved.
The nation of India is racing to provide power to a rapidly developing economy and growing population.
But modern forms of energy are not reaching potential users in rural India, according to Ambuj Sagar at Harvard University.
Ambuj Sagar: The power sector is important for India because it’s important for the country’s development, but it directly serves only a small portion of the country’s population.
Sagar told Earth & Sky that an estimated 70% of India’s population lives in rural areas. Most of them lack access to clean, efficient energy systems. They burn hand-gathered solid fuels like wood and dung for indoor cooking. This way of producing energy is known to cause health problems.
And in fact, energy poverty has emerged as a large public health issue, thought to affect about a third of Earth’s total population, or about 2 to 2.5 billion people worldwide. Dr. Sagar said that India’s demand for electrical power is currently outstripping the supply.
He said the government’s emphasis is on powering industrial, commercial, and urban growth, with little talk in India’s energy conversation about how to bring modern power to the villages.
Ambuj Sagar: To my mind, there’s a bit of a disconnect between focus on energy policies and some really pressing energy problems in India.
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These people should be proud because of how small their “carbon footprint” is. After all they are living the life the envy of Greenies when it comes to fossil fuels or any type of fuel! They are the ultimate recyclers to use Dung for fuel.
I am glad to see someone try to convey the problem ,which need to be solved immediately,to the world.To make the place we lived better, people first have to recognize the problems which stem from economic growth and then solve those problems right away.
It seems like every thing we do today can cause us health problems. Re you saying it is hazardous to your health if you burn wood? Or dung?
25 million versus 25 billion versus 25 trillion dollars? That is the question.
Is humanity soon to be confronted with million dollar global challenges or billion dollar global challenges, or even trillion dollar ones?
If the daunting global challenges posed to humanity by the astounding growth of the human population overspreading Earth are as huge as they appear in these early years of Century XXI, then 25 million dollars is a pitiful pittance.
Afterall, in 2006 Goldman Sachs awarded year-end bonuses to certain employees totalling more than 16 billion dollars.
How many trillion dollars will the USA alone pay for the fiasco in Iraq?
If we can spend billions of dollars to reward one corporation’s economic powerbrokers for underwriting another year of soon to become unsustainable economic growth and throw away trillions of dollars to protect access to, and to control, a supply of mid-East oil, surely we can find adequate funds to deal with climate change.
As things now stand, the funds given to preserve Earth as a fit place for human habitation by our children amount literally to nothing more than “drops in the bucket.”
For a moment, let’s us consider that climate change is the size and has the shape of a weapon of mass destruction which has to be acknowledged, addressed and overcome. That is to say, dealing reasonably and sensibly with climate change is the equivalent of a categorical imperative.
In the light of such circumstances, current leaders can be seen failing to respond ably to what people everywhere can see as somehow real. Current, politics-as-usual leadership appears to be primarily engaged in fools’ errands, while refusing to so much as openly acknowledge, much less begin to address, the ominously looming global challenges visible, even now, on the far horizon.
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
To dear stevenearlsalmony:
I would like to say that Goldman Sachs’s bonuses are not only a investment on human resource but also a way to attract more competent professionals to make much more money to the company to give more astonishing bonuses. The more money you invest, the more,also the less money, money you earn. Outstanding analysts are their assets to make much more money and that is the reason why Goldman Sachs’s gave,or invest,bonuses to employees.
To pursue a successful career and a job for making a living, people in the world almost spent all of time to get themselves promoted to higher position. They will not take any actions to reduce the impacts what climate change imposes even though they aware how serious consequence climate change will results in.
I think that the best and the most directly way to get more money to deal with climate change is by law what the government works hard now. We can anticipate government to spend more money on environmental issues but we cant take huge bonuses in consideration. The only thing Financial institutions,such as Goldman Sachs, should do is make much more money. To protect the environment is not their goal.
Dear Sheng-Feng,
At least to me, there is something unforunate in what you are reporting because, if you are correct, the power of money on Earth could soon overwhelm the resources of Earth from which all that Goldman Sachs wealth is derived. The Earth’s atmosphere is being degraded, its resources dissipated and its surface denuded by unbridled, rampant economic globalization promoted so adamantly and relentlessly by corporations like Goldman Sachs, is it not?
Before there was ever such a thing as manmade economy, or a Goldman Sachs, there was God’s Creation. I suppose that after the global economy and corporations like Goldman Sachs can no longer be sustained by the limited resources and frangible ecosystem services of Earth, there will still be God’s Creation.
Thanks for talking the talk, so that one day people can walk the walk. When it comes to dealing with the real issues of our world, willful deafness, hysterical blindness and elective mutism mark in our time, due to the momentary dominance of too many misguided wealthy and powerful individuals and their many minions in the mass media and elsewhere.
In an age when the adage “see no truth, hear no truth, speak no truth” rules, the family of humanity cannot do without people like you and others speaking out loudly and clearly in blogs like this one, Grist, Orion and Dot Earth.
Always,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Dear Friends,
Let us remember that an ordinary fellow named Noah built the vital Ark that saved life as we know it. It took a remarkably large number of self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe to construct the colossal wreckage known as the Titanic.
Sincerely,
Steve
History teaches us empires come and go, rise and fall; but history provides no evidence for the existence of so huge, and soon to become unsustainable, an empire, one that actually threatens to engulf the surface of our planetary home in the way the seemingly endless expansion of the “economic globalization empire” is doing in our time.
The gigantic scale and rapid growth rate of the unbridled, global big-business empire, the one we recognize as the predominant human construction on Earth, appears to be approaching a point in history when this economic empire irreversibly degrades Earth’s frangible ecosystems, dangerously dissipates its limited resources, and recklessly diminishes Earth’s capacity to offer a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Constructing reality using the mindset of a child could be an unfortunate, even dangerous thing to be doing.
Children view the world and see things differently from adults. Perhaps, adults would be wise not to inadvertently adopt the faulty ways of thinking and perceiving of children when it comes to understanding the role human beings are playing in inducing the daunting global challenges which loom ominously before humanity on the far horizon.
Not seeing that the colossal size of the multi-trillion dollar global economy is soon to become unsustainable in the relatively small finite world we inhabit is a misperception;
not seeing that increasing per-capita consumption of Earth’s limited resources by six billion, soon to be nine billion, people cannot go on much longer, much less forever, is a mistaken impression; and
not seeing that absolute global human population numbers, just like the population numbers of other species, cannot increase endlessly, relative to a limited resource base, is a misconception.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
On Friday, the 18th, I sent an email to Mr. Sagar which actually addressed the expressed need of the article (a potential energy solution for poorer Indians) – only to recieve not so much as “thanks-but-no-thanks” for a reply.
Then, to read these posts, which are more about “cash” than current, I’m left thinking I must have missed the point of the article!
Dear Gil,
Dr. Sagar seems to be saying that there are 2 to 2.5 billion people are suffering from what he calls “energy poverty.”
Dr. Sagar is also noting a “disconnect” between energy policies and energy production, I suppose.
At least to me, when millions of people on the planet recklessly waste energy resources while billions of other, less fortunate human beings go without the necessities of life, this is another serious “disconnect” that calls out for acknowledgement and remediation.
Sincerely,
Steve
Humanity has been warned repeatedly about the threat to humanity, to life as we know it, to the viability of recognizably frangible global ecosystems and to the integrity of Earth and its limited resources that could be posed to humankind by the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers. Because we want human beings to be fed and to have jobs so they can feed themselves and their families, the growth of human numbers has lead great thinkers and scientists to regularly remind the human community of the impacts of unregulated human propagation, unrestrained consumption and rampantly expanding production activities in our planetary home.
Every possible bias, rhetorical device and “spin” appears to have been employed to deny the mounting evidence of the potential for impending ecological calamities and economic disasters from the near exponential growth of human numbers worldwide. Recently, good scientific evidence of climate change, about the way the world works, has been systematically discredited; leading elders of the political economy have consciously conspired to mislead the public by misrepresenting the science and by turning climate science into a “political football” of sorts; ideological groups sponsored by super-rich, large-scale corporate ‘citizens’ have spread uncertainty and confusion in discussions about the nature of the biophysical world in which we live; and controversy has been manufactured where none would have otherwise existed.
The illusion of meaningful debate has been foisted upon the public by leaders who are evidently intent on “poisoning the well” of public discourse by knowingly and selfishly fostering disinformation campaigns for the purpose of enhancing their own financial interests….....come what may for our children, coming generations, global biodiversity, the environment, and the Earth as a fit place for human habitation.
The elder guarantors of a good enough future for the children appear to be leading our kids down a “primrose path” along which the children could unexpectedly be confronted with sudden, potentially colossal threats to human and environmental health that appear to be derived from human-driven, converging global challenges such as pernicious impacts of global warming and climate change, pollution of the air, water and land from microscopic particulates and solid waste, and the reckless dissipation of scarce natural resources. All the while, these leading elders remain in denial of the fulminating ecological degradation by willfully declining to acknowledge, much less begin to address, humanity’s emerging, human-induced predicament. One day, perhaps sooner rather than later, our children could have extraordinary difficulties responding ably to that with which they could soon come face to face; that is to say, because their leaders have so adamantly refused to acknowlege God’s great gift of the good science of biological and physical reality, our kids will not even know what “hit” them, much less why it is happening.
Please note the concerns I am trying to communicate are expressed much better today by Cameron Smith at the following link.
http://www.thestar.com/Article/297574
As always, your thoughts are welcome.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001