With some energy literacy, folks may realize that there may not be a silver bullet answer for all of humanity’s energy needs. Whether you ultimately drive an internal combustion engine vehicle or an EV, and get exposed to electricity from wind, solar, coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydro generation, will depend on you or your community’s wealth.
Most people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. They are just confused about how to achieve both.
A complex trade-off associated with policy choices of moving too quickly into intermittent electricity from wind and solar is that abandoning fossil fuels will further deprive and/or delay from providing at least 80 percent of humanity, or more than 6 billion in this world living on less than $10 a day, from enjoying the same products that benefit the wealthy and healthy countries.
Energy poverty is among the most crippling but least talked-about crises of the 21st century. Billions live with little to no access to electricity. Electricity is the one of the simplest solutions to improved health, economic opportunity, education, nutrition, and comfort in the developing world, especially for women and girls.
The wealthy and healthy countries benefit from the more than 6,000 products that are all made from oil derivatives, most of which did not even exist in the developed countries before the 1900’s.
Interestingly, the world has had almost 200 years to develop clones or generics to replace the crude oil derivatives that are the foundation of all the products that are the basis of lifestyles and economies around the world. Wind and solar are not only incapable of manufacturing any such derivatives, but the manufacturing of wind and solar components are themselves dependent on the derivatives made from crude oil.
Ever since the discovery of the versatility of products available from petroleum derivatives, and the beginning of manufacturing and assembly of cars, trucks, airplanes, and military equipment in the early 1900’s, the world has had almost 200 years to develop clones or generics to replace the crude oil derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products that are the basis of lifestyles and economies of the healthier and wealthier countries around the world.
In the world’s poorest countries, there are 11 million children in the world dying every year. The insistence that we should limit future access to the fossil fuels and the products made from oil derivatives has an even more dramatic cost, because cheap and accessible power, and products from fossil fuels are lifesaving, and one of the best ways out of poverty.
Read the rest of this piece at Daily Clout.
Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
Photo credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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