The world's energy-poor need hydrocarbon fuels

You are a tribal woman in the Jharkhand region of north-eastern India. Sustaining life has always been tough, but it has become harder of late. Environmentalists, obsessed by what they see as the deforestation of the subcontinent, have imposed a fuel-cutting ban in the protected forest near your village.

It was bad enough for your mother, who had to spend hours bending down, hacking saplings with her small sickle-shaped daoli, but now you can only gather dry, fallen leaves or small twigs from the thorny bush you call putus. You must also go much farther afield to collect your daily fuel needs.

Yet you are probably unaware that you live in a potentially wealthy and powerful country, one with a nuclear deterrent and one that produces some of the finest writers and scientists in the world. You would be even more surprised to learn that your small cooking fires have been blamed recently for causing a brown haze above Asia that is said to be threatening the rich countries of Europe with dire climate change.

You may also find it amusing, if somewhat paradoxical, to discover that your leaves and twigs are called "biomass fuels", and that biomass fuels are being touted as part of a "green" solution to save the world. And you would be amazed that this week more than 60,000 people are sitting down in Johannesburg, South Africa, at a United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development, the "Earth Summit 2002", to discuss both you and the planet.

But, "unknown citizen", you are not alone. While food is more affordable for most, you are one of the three billion people who must survive on less than £2 a day. Overall, the average expectancy of life at birth has doubled during the past two centuries, although you know personally some of the 800 million who are chronically undernourished.

And you share with 1.3 billion a lack of access to safe, clean drinking water, so that two million people, mainly children, die each year of water-borne diseases. But, above all, along with a quarter of the world's population, you have no supply of power or electricity for your daily needs. You must laboriously garner and burn dung or wood to heat your hearth, light your darkness, and cook your food. You are one of the energy poor.

In The Ultimate Resource 2, Julian Simon describes energy as the "master resource", and he argues that "if the cost of usable energy is low enough, all other important resources can be made plentiful". For the past 200 years, this master resource has been energy derived from hydrocarbons, from coal, oil and gas.

Although at first taking a toll through miners' lives, this energy eventually freed from drudgery our European fuel gatherers, the equivalents of our "unknown citizen", who are so poignantly portrayed in Millet's charcoal drawing of Women Carrying Fagots and Monet's c.1864 oil painting, Road in the Forest with Wood Gatherers. If the Earth Summit does nothing to liberate the Asian and African fuel gatherers from their burdens, then it will have failed abysmally.

But, unfortunately, energy could prove to be one of the most contentious issues at the summit, because environmentalists have decreed hydrocarbons to be the new witchcraft behind "global warming" and "unsustainability", despite the fact, so well argued by Robert L Bradley, Jr in a new book, Sustainable Development: Promoting Progress or Perpetuating Poverty?, that the hydrocarbon age is in its infancy.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has calculated that total cumulative world consumption of hydrocarbons constitutes only 1.4 per cent of what is thought to remain. Moreover, new members of the hydrocarbon family are coming on-stream, such as the so-called "fourth fossil fuel", Orimulsion, a tar-like oil the estimated reserves of which are greater than the global supply of crude oil on an energy-equivalent basis.

And yet further, there is the increasing flexibility of hydrocarbons, which is augmenting significantly the amount of economically recoverable material, as with natural gas. But environmentalists do not want hydrocarbons. They advocate instead "renewable energy", while at the same time opposing the very renewable energy projects they propose.

Hydroelectric power is rejected because it involves the re-settlement of local people, interrupts fish migration, and causes loss of habitat. Wind farms are rightly attacked because they destroy some of the last remaining wilderness and can kill birds. Tidal barrages disrupt estuarine ecosystems, while geothermal projects mar sensitive ecological areas.

Yet other "renewables" remain more fantasy than reality, with most photovoltaic, solar, cells, for example, producing less energy in their lifetime than is needed to make them in the first place. Big alternatives, such as nuclear fission and fusion, are, of course, rejected out of hand.

With more than a quarter of the world's population classed as "energy poor", we must have growth in energy use. And, just as economic growth has removed the heavy burden from the bent back of Millet's wood gatherer, so too it must be allowed, unfettered by environmental myths, to replace the leaves, twigs and choking smoke of millions of fires.

And what of the Asian brown haze that has so suddenly been brought to our attention? Known already in the early 1980s by US pilots flying out of their base at Diego Garcia, this haze has probably been around for hundreds of years, fed by the fires of our "unknown citizen" and of the billions who have lived before her on the great Asian continent.

This is therefore a plea for our "unknown citizen", knowledge of whose life is based on the outstanding work of Dr Sarah Jewitt of Nottingham University. Blessed are the poor in energy, for they, like us, will become rich in hydrocarbons. Blessed are the poor in water, for they shall drink safely, while we, worried about every shadow of a chemical, spend millions on "natural" bottled water because we no longer like the tap water that has made us healthy and saved so many lives.

The major challenges of Earth Summit 2002 are unquestionably eradicating energy poverty and water poverty, the twin devils of the developing world. We need Clare Short's development, not Michael Meacher's environmentalism.

* Philip Stott is Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London

Dare I say Environmental racism?

Why not? It's the truth.

These are the same people who yell about "Factory Farms" and extol the virtues of small organic farms. They then yell about the "natural habitat” that is being destroyed by the slash and burn agriculture common in the third world. And bemoan the death of many poor people from the diseases caused by the commonly used organic fertilizer.

My dear knuckleheads, people have to eat!

a.cricket

Maybe the world's poor should be invited to the Brit's buffet table at the summit, since their delegation is too busy to eat it anyway and would probably just have to throw out all that lobster and caviar with the garbage anyway.

More seriously, it's painfully evident that, once again, the Poverty Pimps are the worst enemy of those they claim they're trying to help. I'm 1000% for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. We currently generate less than 20% of our electricity using nuclear power, and nothing would please me more than to see that raised to 40 or even 60%

I'm also strongley in favor of constructing electricly powered mass-transportation systems such as light-rail for urban commuting, and high-speed rail or maglev for inter-city travel in our nation's most densely populated regions. The combined result of these two technologies would make significant quantities of fossil fuels available for other uses.

Sadly, the enviro-whackos are vehemently opposed to this peaceful and beneficial use of nuclear power. Therefor, I can only suggest that the world's poor try to eat more beans and use the flatulence as fuel.

I guess the tree huggers attidue is "let 'em use beef tallow and cow pies for fuel. I guess they could use the cow pies, since they and the quite similar buffalo chips served the same purpose in the American West. Good enough for my grandma should be good enough for her Indian counterpart. Besides, if there is anything the Indians have lots of, it's cow pies. My mother's family was still burning corn cobs for heating and cooking when she was a girl.

Whoa there! Poor people can't use their flatulence for fuel, that would cause severe environmental degradation. They could eat each other however. This would solve over-population and hunger at the same time.

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