Chapter 1: Energy Poverty
by Brian Gitt
Eighteen-year-old Grace wakes every day at 4:00am to start the one-hour trek to Lake Victoria to collect water for her Ugandan family. The trip is physically demanding: the water container she carries weighs about 40 pounds when full. The trip is also dangerous. Many women like Grace live daily with the fear of being attacked while fetching water or wood. One day, four men attacked Grace, dragged her into the bushes, and raped her.
Grace lives with her family in a one-room structure built of mud, straw, and sticks with no running water, no electricity, no heating, and no toilet. She washes her family’s clothes by hand in the lake, and she cooks over a wood fire. The smoke she inhales daily while cooking is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes. It is getting harder for her to find wood for cooking since local people have cut down most of the nearby trees, leaving her village and the surrounding area littered with stumps.
There’s no sanitation, so the water she and her family drink is often polluted with harmful microbes and parasites that spread waterborne diseases. Grace rarely gets medical care because the closest clinic is half a day’s walk away.
Life is so hard for Grace and her family because they live in energy poverty: they have no access to the reliable and affordable energy sources that people in the developed world take for granted.
Energy poverty hurts people.
Over 3 billion people worldwide—40% of the Earth’s population—live in energy poverty. About 700 million have no access to electricity. No electricity means no refrigeration, no lighting, no heating or air conditioning, no water treatment, no health care, and often little or no formal education. More than 1.7 billion have no basic sanitation services, such as toilets. About 2.5 billion people still cook with wood, charcoal, or dung, and millions (mostly women) spend hours a day gathering fuel for cooking and water for drinking. Household smoke kills over 3 million people every year. And energy poverty on the whole causes 10 million premature deaths every year—more than COVID-19, malaria, and AIDS combined.
Energy poverty hurts the environment.
Poor countries with limited access to energy pollute more, and environmental damage increases as the gap between rich and poor countries widens. Take just one example: many people in developing countries rely on wood for cooking and heating. This everyday need for wood contributes to severe deforestation, which in turn leads to habitat destruction for many species of plants and animals. Tree roots anchor the soil, so when forests are destroyed, rain and wind gradually carry the soil away, leaving native plants and animals struggling to survive. As a result, poor countries have the highest rate of endangered and threatened wildlife.
Haiti, for example, suffers severe deforestation because so many people rely on wood for cooking and heating. Haitians burn wood charcoal for 60% of their domestic energy production. A hundred years ago, over 60% of Haiti's land was forested. Today, less than 1% is. By contrast, forests in the neighboring Dominican Republic remain largely intact, even though it consumes eight times more energy per capita than Haiti. The big difference is that the Dominican Republic gets almost all of its energy from fossil fuels.
Energy poverty can be eradicated.
If energy-impoverished countries could build power plants and energy pipelines, they could also build water purification plants, hospitals, schools, and roads. Families like Grace’s would have gas for cooking and heating, running water for drinking and sanitation, abundant food, and access to health care and education.
But many leaders in the developed world have decided that people like Grace shouldn’t get the energy they need to live better lives.
They believe the environment will suffer if people like Grace get the kind of reliable, affordable energy that developed countries have long enjoyed.