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Page added on November 30, 2017

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Today’s Poor Needs More Oil, Natural Gas, And Coal

Simply put, the world has no greater problem than energy deprivation and poverty. They shorten human lives by decades. I’m going to use this post to put some horrifically sad numbers to you because ending poverty today is our most critical global goal. I’ve written peer-reviewed journal articles on this stuff and have come to realize that we rich Westeners know almost nothing about how poor the world really is. In short, “climate scientists are everywhere, poverty scientists are nowhere.” So, this piece is vital to our energy-environment conversation, which has been decidedly one-sided in environment’s favor.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, just some facts to arm you for the holiday conversation with your brother-in-law that is sure to focus on protecting the world’s unborn great grandkids by limiting energy options for the world’s poor dying prematurely today. Remember two things: more money is the key to better health and it’s very telling that fossil fuels – oil, gas, and coal – account for nearly 85% of the energy used in the world’s best economies. Reliable, affordable energy is the impetus for everything.

    1. Let’s hope the world’s climate is indeed changing: 6 in every 7 humans today live in undeveloped nations, perpetually burdened with having just 5% of the income that we Americans enjoy.
    1. The Paris-based International Energy Agency has been reporting for years that 1,300 million humans have no electricity. And it’s actually far worse than that: IEA’s data are based on a pathetically far too low threshold level of just 75 kWh consumption, or what Americans use in 2 or 3 days. Thus, in reality, billions of people lack adequate access to electricity – the enabling force of a modern life. Without access to power, the digital divide between the world’s rich and poor is widening literally every day. Even under the best-case scenario, 600-800 million humans will still have no electricity decades from now.
    2. Sub-Saharan Africa is the fastest growing region for population on Earth, and over 60% of the population there, over 6o0 million humans, have no electricity whatsoever.
    3. India is the most energy deprived nation on Earth and has 370 million children under the age of 15 – or the equivalent of the entire populations of the U.S. and Canada. Over 700 million Indians have no access to modern energy and unimaginably have no refrigeration. At 750 kWh per capita, or 5% of what Americans consume today, Indians use the same amount of electricity as we Americans did in 1930.
  1. Tens of nations in Africa consume 100-200 kWh of electricity per capita, compared to 6,300 kWh in Europe and 13,300 kWh in the U.S. Our live expectancies are 30 years higher than theirs – no wonder given how indispensable electricity is.
  2. Around 3 billion people – 40% of the world – cook and heat their homes using open fires and simple stoves burning biomass (wood, animal dung, and crop waste). That’s the equivalent of smoking 400 cigarettes every hour. Thus every day, 11,000 people die from cooking smoke.
  3. Not having access to modern fuels and electricity impacts women and children the most, because they are the ones that spend their entire days gathering fuel and completing daily tasks that we Westerners take for granted. For example, each day, South African women walk the equivalent to the moon and back 16 times to simply collect water. These unfortunate ones have no chance to better their lives through education or retaining a job because they are forced to spend their entire days accomplishing the mundane. Women are 50% of the global population but over 70% of those stuck in energy poverty. Limiting their energy options cannot be a goal.
  4. More renewable energy cannot be the primary energy goal for the developing world that is so drastically energy deprived: renewables are too expensive and naturally intermittent and therefore less reliable. To illustrate, Germany and Denmark are the wind capitals of Europe, and home power rates there are respectively 40 and 42 cents per kWh, compared to 12 cents here in the U.S.
  5. There are 25,000 homeless in the great city of Los Angeles, many of them U.S. war veterans. No offense Mayor Garcetti and Governor Brown, with such a calamity within your midst, you have absolutely no right to continue to tell us how “clean” your electricity is. Once again, rich, powerful people ignoring the depth of poverty that surrounds them – even when it sits on their own city streets.
  6. The most horrific one, and the one I want you to remember most: 21,000 children perish every day from poverty, tragic deaths enabled by a lack of modern energy that we Westerners are really incapable of even imagining. They can only be helped by getting access to modern energy today.

Maybe most unfortunately, the energy companies themselves don’t fight nearly hard enough to promote their own products, seemingly stuck like a deer in headlights by the incredibly well organized, young, and ambitious environmental groups. The reality of “we must end poverty today” concept has been lost on the fossil fuel companies. They need entire divisions on how oil, gas, and coal have helped the world. For example, I’ve already shown how oil and gas companies could be heroes in Africa, here.

Forbes



108 Comments on "Today’s Poor Needs More Oil, Natural Gas, And Coal"

  1. Davy on Mon, 4th Dec 2017 5:28 am 

    Nice, mad kat, which comment hit home and made you feel angry and upset? Let me know so I can specialize more on that approach. You are being neutered old man by superior intellect and you are being crushed. LMFAO. Whine and gnash your teeth more pussy. If you will notice the bullying putdowns are all focused on you or your buddies grehg and dumb und dutchy. Why, because you all are extremist anti-American scum that’s why.

  2. GregT on Mon, 4th Dec 2017 7:37 am 

    ” You are being neutered old man by superior intellect and you are being crushed. LMFAO. Whine and gnash your teeth more pussy. If you will notice the bullying putdowns are all focused on you or your buddies grehg and dumb und dutchy. Why, because you all are extremist anti-American scum that’s why.”

    Get help.

  3. JuanP on Mon, 4th Dec 2017 8:00 am 

    Cloggie “That is what, on a much smaller scale, happened in Argentina, in the early eighties under Galtieri. He managed initially to stem internal unrest by invading the Falklands, a wildly popular move among Argentinians. When the British struck back, it was over and out for the Galtieri regime.”
    That is exactly what happened. I am amazed you have such a clear understanding of this issue. I would not expect many foreigners to know or remember this. It was so long ago and so much has happened in the world since. You obviously do your research. I lived through this as I visited my cousins in Argentina several times a year then. I remember the general discontent with the junta before the war and, then, the euphoria when Argentina invaded the Malvinas. I also remember how badly it all ended and what a close call it was. If Argentina had had a handful more Exocets they probably would have won the war, but the British knew they didn’t.

  4. JuanP on Mon, 4th Dec 2017 8:04 am 

    Cloggie, I volunteered at Montevideo’s British Hospital. I read the papers to wounded British sailors once a week for a few months because one of my aunts worked there.

  5. Davy on Mon, 4th Dec 2017 8:21 am 

    Grehg, you are an extremist west coast Canadian anti-American pig. You stalk and prick Americans exclusively. You enable and flank other anti-American extremist. You have had comments where you told me you want to have gay sex with me. Other comments you want to beat me to an inch of my life. I assume these are at night when you are drunk. You are then telling me you are going to find me. It is documented you have a therapist. Does the wife get beat? Does she know you are bisexual? Are you a stalker and a rapist and the courts are making you seek help?

  6. Cloggie on Mon, 4th Dec 2017 9:57 am 

    That is exactly what happened. I am amazed you have such a clear understanding of this issue.

    I was following events intensively at the time via BBC World Service radio. I was very much into Britain at the time and hoped they would win, which they did. My pro-Britain/pro-Churchill attitude reached an all-time high in 1995 with the 50 year commemoration of the end of WW2 (Germany not invited). I visited the beaches of Normandy for a week, toke the ferry to nearby Dover, visited the “war-time tunnels”. Nostalgia orgy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Castle

    Five years later the Fortuyn-drama happened in the Netherlands and I became acutely aware of the impending immigration disaster, I had missed because I had worked in Germany during most of the nineties. Took my mother to Amsterdam only to verify that the street with her parental home had become a Muslim hellhole. Shocking experience. Turned me from lib-left into “somewhat right-wing” in a matter of a few years.

    Now I am a “natzi” according to some of the “Learned Elders” here on this board, whatever a “natzi” may mean in 2017 other than a favorite US smear word.lol

    Learned an incredible lot from notably American revisionists about what really happened during WW2:

    http://www.ihr.org/main/search.shtml

    One of the best articles:

    http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p135_Weber.html

    Currently I’m not very deep into Britain anymore, let alone American officialdom and have more sympathy for the Germans, who were setup for the slaughter as of 1934 by Roosevelt, Stalin and water carrier Churchill:

    https://documents1940.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/churchill-stalin-alliance-as-of-1934/

    If Argentina had had a handful more Exocets they probably would have won the war, but the British knew they didn’t.

    Exactly. If US secretary Al Haig had not persuaded countries around the world NOT to deliver fresh Exocet missiles to Argentina, Argentina would have won, hook, line and sinker.

    These events changed my views on naval warfare and the futility of a navy in a real war in the 21st century, although you can still use a navy to block small countries. But in a war China-USA for instance, the US navy is completely worthless for attacking mainland China itself, but can still be used to interrupt supply lines far away from China, like oil shipping from the Gulf, although the Chinese have Russian oil backup and the Chinese have subs and a submarine base in the Horn of Africa. Good luck with that, US navy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_naval_base_in_Djibouti

    But the US spends 40% of its military budget on the navy, largely a wasted investment in 2017.

    The rule in the 21st century is: supersonic missiles, launched from land, ships or subs, beat sitting duck vessels. Regardless who owns the missiles and ships.

    https://thesaker.is/the-russian-navy-at-the-crossroads-paradoxes-and-choices/

    To put it provocatively: navies of party A are an asset of the enemy B. A largely useless drain on fiscal resources of A.

  7. Davy on Mon, 4th Dec 2017 10:16 am 

    Dutchy, your understanding of military matters was clearly shown when you claimed there are 10MIL men under arms on the Korean peninsula. You don’t understand military matter. You are an agendist cherry picking facts and packaging them to further your agenda. Anyone with a brain can see right through your revisions and fantasies.

  8. MASTERMIND on Mon, 4th Dec 2017 2:22 pm 

    Madkat

    Said the new silk road will be ready. Sixty percent of countries in it are rated in junk status…LOL How deluded can one be? And brainwashed to the Chinese?

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