One of our Huntsville environmental scientists has often testified about how policies to reduce CO{2} condemn the poor to poverty: Why would you go to wind energy that is so much more expensive or solar? The point here is that if it's not economically sustainable, it's not sustainable. And you have to have an energy plan that's sustainable, that people can afford. Right now, wind and solar, you can't afford. And so the only wind and solar that exists is because of huge government subsidies. I'm not against renewables or any other source of energy. Can we afford it? Solar and wind are so low density that it takes acres and square miles to do anything. And that's not environmentally smart. Source: 7 questions with John Christy and Roy Spencer: Climate change skeptics for 25 years | AL.com Well it turns out there is an answer: https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-documents/10964.pdf Coal is the world’s number one source of CO 2 emissions. Most historic emissions came from the coal industry in the developed world in the last century, with China joining the biggest emitters at the beginning of this one. It is widely accepted that a rapid and just response to climate change will require the urgent replacement of coal with low-carbon energy sources in rich economies. Now the coal industry claims that expanding coal use is critical to fighting extreme poverty and improving energy access for billions of people in developing countries. In fact, the opposite is true. The global commitment to eradicate extreme poverty and energy poverty by 2030 does not require such an expansion and it is incompatible with stabilising the earth’s climate. The evidence is clear: a lasting solution to poverty requires the world’s wealthiest economies to renounce coal, and we can and must end extreme poverty without the precipitous expansion of new coal power in developing ones. This paper points out: The biggest challenge to achieving universal energy access is not generating much greater amounts of energy; it is getting it to those who have it least (Hogarth and Granoff, 2015). The aggregate effective demand of very poor people for modern electricity services is low. Most projections of demand growth in the developing world represent the growing industrial, commercial and residential consumption of individuals and enterprises already connected to the grid. Meeting that demand is important for development, but it is not the same as meeting the SDG7 goal of providing universal energy access. Detailed time series analyses by World Bank economist Martin Ravallion have revealed that China’s success in reducing extreme poverty was primarily driven by growth in agricultural productivity, enabled by regulatory changes that dismantled collective farms and empowered smallholder farmers to benefit economically from managing their own farms (Ravallion, 2008). Between 1980 and 1985, agricultural productivity increased by an average of 7.5% per year, much of it among the poorest households. Urbanisation and the growth of export- orientated manufacturing also played a role, but can be credited with less than one quarter of the extreme poverty reduction between 1981 and 2004 (World Bank, 2016). While few, if any, countries have succeeded in dramatically reducing poverty without industrialising, no poorer agrarian economies have succeeded in either materially reducing extreme poverty or industrialising without first improving agricultural productivity in ways that benefit the rural poor (Ravallion, 2008). Small-scale agriculture remains the primary employer in the majority of least developed countries, representing 48% of the developing world labour force (Cheong et al., 2013). In sub-Saharan Africa, it employs seven times as many people as industry (Ibid.). For the first time in history, renewable energy options are highly competitive with coal in nearly all markets, and becoming increasingly so. Renewable energy resources have the advantage of being more abundant and lower-cost than coal, and renewable technologies can be flexibly deployed and create more jobs. If power sectors are designed to integrate them, as discussed below, they also become increasingly reliable. There is more in the report but this is an example of 3d world, electricity networks, India: Africa, South America: Philippines: Power has to reach the end user and that last km problem remains a hard problem when on one side is the big coal power plant and on the other such grinding poverty that we get wire nests like these. It is worse in rural electricity. In the 1950s, my grandfather lived on a farm new Tryon OK and had a wind powered, DC generator. It charged the batteries that operated his tube radio. Yet he used kerosene lamps and wood fed, Franklin stove. Later, his house burned down. Regardless, a climate scientists who is also a self-proclaimed expert in renewable energy makes one wonder. Bob Wilson
