Part 3 of a new educational industry series from your CEO
By CEO Matt Berry, appearing in Ohio Cooperative Living magazine, August 2022
While politicians, environmentalists and the media have been attacking carbon dioxide (which you exhale) as a “social cost,” I take the opposite view: No material thing has been more beneficial to the plight of humankind than the marshalling of fossil fuels to lift billions of humans out of squalor, suffering, and drudgery.
According to the book, “A Question of Power: Electricity and The Wealth of Nations,” by Robert Bryce, roughly 3.3 billion people – about 45% of all the people on the planet – live in places where per-capita electricity consumption is less than 1,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year, or less than the amount used by one refrigerator. For comparison, the average Midwest Electric home uses 1,500 kWh per month.
About 1 billion of those people have no access to electricity at all, according to the International Energy Agency. These numbers are real, today. Not global warming projections and models that change by the week. They represent actual human beings, living in squalor while we live like kings and queens.
Consider the effect electrification has on women and girls. A 2002 study in Bangladesh found that the literacy rate for females in villages with electricity was 31 percent higher than it was in villages that lacked electricity. The study concluded that the availability of electricity has a “significant influence on education, especially on the quality of education.”
A 2010 study on post-apartheid electrification in South Africa found that “employment grows in places that get new access to electricity.” And electrification led to “large increases in the use of electric lighting and cooking, and reductions in wood-fueled cooking over a five year period, as well as a 9.5% increase in female employment.”
A 2012 study of rural electrification in India concluded it increased school enrollment by about 6% for boys and 7.4% for girls; increases weekly study time by more than an hour; and children with electricity perform better than those without.
The same study showed household access to electricity increases employment hours by more than 17% for women; and electrification reduces the poverty rate by 13.3%.
Shortages of electricity are the common factor in nearly every country where women and girls are cursed with illiteracy and child marriage. If you are a female without access to electricity, you are effectively a slave to the physical chores of the household: hauling water, making fires, grinding grain, hand-washing, etc.
People with access to electricity live on average 16 years longer than their non-electric counterparts. Child mortality is 10 times higher in the non-electric countries.
Another 2.7 billion people – about 37% of the world’s population – are living in what Bryce calls “low watt countries.” Per-capita electric use is about 3,900 kWh per year, which is about what an American family uses in 3 months. These countries are not necessarily poor as a whole, but large segments of their population are.
Some of the countries in this group include China, Chile, and Turkey. They need more electricity (affordable and reliable) in order to lift their citizens out of poverty.
The point is, 45% of the world – 3.3 billion people – still has no access to reliable and affordable electricity. Which do you think is more important to humanity: Lifting people out of poverty, or theoretical models of climate change?
The point is, 45% of the world – 3.3 billion people – still has no access to reliable and affordable electricity. Which do you think is more important to humanity: Lifting people out of poverty, or theoretical models of climate change?
Because renewables like wind and solar are unreliable and intermittent, nuclear and fossil fuels, primarily coal, are the best way to meet this need. We should be doing everything we can to encourage and support baseload power generation throughout the world. And that will mostly require fossil fuels and nuclear.
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