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A picture of energy poverty
December 17, 2010 by Alex Epstein
“The most important and most overlooked energy issue today,” I wrote in “Energy at the Speed of Thought,” “is the growing crisis of global energy supply. Cheap, industrial-scale energy is essential to building, transporting, and operating everything we use, from refrigerators to Internet server farms to hospitals. It is desperately needed in the undeveloped world, where 1.6 billion people lack electricity, which contributes to untold suffering and death. And it is needed in ever-greater, more-affordable quantities in the industrialized world: Energy usage and standard of living are directly correlated.”
In a recent post on Master Resource, Donald Hertzmark elaborates on this point. Hertzmark gives many valuable facts and figures about the degree of “energy squalor” that exists in the world, but to me the most powerful part was this image–a picture of the entire world at night, revealing which parts of the world (such as North America) are alight with plentiful energy, and which parts (such as much of Africa) are dark with energy poverty. Remember that image next time you hear that the whole world needs to drastically cut its usage of practical forms of energy (coal, oil, natural gas).
