Rationale

The attention given to the energy-based problems of global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions and peak oil has tended to ignore another immediate and pressing energy-based problem afflicting a third of the world’s population. This problem cries out for energy justice for a number of compelling and interconnected reasons.

First, indoor pollution, one manifestation of this other problem, is extracting a horrendous toll of death and sickness, especially among women and children. It blights the 2 to 2.5 billion energy oppressed poor (EOP) who rely on fire as their sole source of energy for cooking, illumination and heating. Fires are made by burning animal dung, waste, crop residues, rotted wood, other forms of “bad” biomass, and raw coal. Using an open fire, or traditional stove fueled by biomass results in inefficient combustion that releases dangerous quantities of carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and other pollutants. These indoor pollutants result in the premature death every year of between 1.3 and 1.6 million women and children from pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, lung cancer and asthma. They also cause chronic respiratory ailments and debilitating sickness for many more millions (1).

Second, recent scientific investigations published in peer-reviewed journals of the highest standing conclude that black carbon or soot emitted by the burning of biomass makes the second strongest contribution to current global warming after carbon dioxide emissions. According to these studies, the particulates in black carbon absorb reflected solar radiation, as well as direct solar radiation, thus warming the atmosphere more severely than other greenhouse gases like methane, halocarbons and tropospheric ozone (2). Moreover, black soot can travel potentially thousands of miles from its sources on air currents, and eventually settle out of the air, onto land and water, and ice. Black soot may lower the albedo, or reflectivity, of polar ice that covers vast stretches of the Arctic and Antarctica. The presence of overlying black soot may result in ice retaining more heat, leading to increased melting, and eventually a warmer Earth (3).

Third, Scientific assessments demonstrate that global warming disproportionately afflicts the EOP because they are unable to adapt to changes in climate, increased droughts or rising seas. Millions of EOP, particularly in Africa, face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies. As the oceans swell with water from melting ice sheets, it is the crowded river deltas in Asia and Egypt, along with small island nations, which are most at risk. While rich countries and peoples are hardly immune from drought and flooding, their wealth will largely insulate them from severe harm, at least for the next generation or two. Not so the EOP. The double envelopment of the EOP in this manner makes their position exceptionally perilous.

Fourth, fire is a hopelessly inadequate source of energy. It does not provide the kind of exogenous energy required for human development. Fire can be used for cooking, and heating but fails to supply the majority of other basic energy needs. Fire does not power water pumps, grinding mills, vehicles, or agricultural equipment. Neither does it provide clean lighting, water filtration, or more generally help create the goods and services required for food, clothing and shelter.

Fifth the situation of the EOP is intolerable under any canon of justice, and cries out for redress (4). Geopolitically, developing peoples (5) have the right to develop, and developed countries have a duty to help them do so. Energy is a prerequisite to sustainable development and to addressing issues of poverty, hunger, education, gender equality, child and maternal health, sanitation, and environmental protection.

Appropriate Sustainable Energy Technologies (ASETs)

It is important, however, that economic and social development be forged in a manner that avoids the major mistakes and costly problems created by the developed world. We should, to the extent feasible, avoid supplying the pressing energy needs of the EOP with more fossil fuels. The global environment is groaning under the polluting load of traditional centralized fossil fuel generated energy, transmitted through expensive, long-distance power distribution and transmission grids, comprised of transmission and power substations, high voltage lines, and transformers.

A better—more enlightened—way of addressing the struggles of the EOP, beginning with indoor air pollution, is through ASETs which fall within the cultural, technological and financial reach and grasp of the rural and urban EOP. ASETs, of the kind illustrated in Table 1, deploy, convert, and harness non fossil fuel exogenous energy to facilitate sustainable development. ASETs can lay the foundation for a new socio-political developmental path that not only avoids the mistakes of centralized fossil power generation, but also creates indigenous developmental opportunities that enable burdened societies, and especially the women within them, to make genuine sustainable economic and social progress.

Sadly, many of the non fossil fuel based technologies that were relied upon by the great ancient civilizations of Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and Greece to support their advance life styles were abandoned with the discovery of coal, and the onset of the industrial revolution. These non hydrocarbon based technologies are legion. They traverse the use of metals, textiles, woodworking, building techniques, levers, ramps. rollers, hydraulic engineering for irrigation, Chinese bellows, row crop farming, bamboo scaffolding, clay for brick making, rainfall harvesting, drainage, the use of cranes, and the practice of medicine. Many of these antiquarian technologies could be revived and merged with more modern ASETs, and marketed where corresponding financing systems are put in place.

Energy Justice, and the World Energy Justice Partnership (WEJP)

Moreover, the energy dominant two-thirds of the world should recognize and remedy the afflictions of the EOP, based on the foundational concepts of international justice developed by John Rawls in his Law of Peoples (6). Energy justice calls for the dissemination and distribution of ASETs to the EOP, and the mainstreaming of women. It further explains why addressing the problem of indoor pollution caused by burning biomass is only one, albeit important step toward creating a more comprehensive basis for the energy-based sustainable development of the EOP. Addressing indoor pollution, along with the mainstreaming of women, should become an important part of an unbroken sustainable energy continuum spanning indoor pollution, agriculture, cottage industries, distributed energy, public health, and education. The World Energy Justice Partnership, presently envisioned as comprising three stages, provides a framework for doing so.

Stage 1:

Appropriate Sustainable Energy Technology (ASET) Information Repository – Create a collaborative online information system and repository to facilitate information collection, sharing, and world-wide development and dissemination of ASETs based on best engineering and management practices.

Energy Justice Law and Policy – Draft a series of international and national policy papers to address the challenges confronting energy justice within existing frameworks of laws and policies dealing with climate change, sustainable development, and technology transfer. These papers, would for example, canvas: the ability and effectiveness of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol; the need for legal regimes that accentuated the importance of adaptation; the crucial importance of including all contributions and causes of global warming including black soot; the need to include the EOP when dealing with the mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions.

Stage 2:

Pilot Demonstration Projects – In close collaboration with NGOs, civil society, and in-country partners, establish pilot demonstration projects for pragmatic best-practice-ASETs.

Stage 3:

Living Communities in Action – In selected countries, expand pilot projects into full-scale integrated energy enterprises in villages and towns that practice sustainable development, and help to stem the flight to cities among rural residents. These enterprises aim to re-position and integrate energy and appropriate technology as foundational elements in the development paradigm. This will be done in partnership with aid and other development programs in developed countries, such as those run by the U.S. Department of Energy, USAID, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Global Village Energy Partnership.

Table 1

Cooking	Efficient cook-stoves, charcoal, biogas, passive solar
Water Filtration and Heating	Efficient cook-stoves, passive solar, desalination, fog-collection, rainwater harvesting
Agricultural Technology	Improved plows, sustainable farming practices, passive solar greenhouses
Irrigation	Drip irrigation systems, treadle-pumps, ram-pumps, rope-pumps, play go round pumps
Draft Animal Technology	Improved harnesses, yokes, feed systems
Lighting	Multifunctional biodiesel platforms, hand-held solar-lamps, mini-electric
Transportation	Local biodiesel, mechanical enhancement, improved wheels, axles, cart-design, solar rickshaws
Waste Management	Composting, pit latrines, urine-diversion dehydration toilets
Housing	Improved construction practices, solar thermal heating
Local Electric	Wind-belt micro-wind, micro& mini hydro, small-solar
Human Power Improvement	Round-abouts, gear-driven shell-crackers

Sources:

1. World Health Organization, Fuel for Life (WHO Press 2006), available at http://www.who.int/indoorair/publications/fuelforlife.pdf [hereinafter WHO, Fuel for Life]. Kirk Smith, Indoor Pollution and Health in Developing Countries (Feb. 8, 2005)

2. V. Ramanathan & G. Carmichael, Global and Regional Climate Changes Due to Black Carbon, 1 Nature Geoscience 221 (2008).

3. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab, Ice Albedo: Black Soot and Snow, 5 http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10023 (last visited Nov. 12, 2008).

4. UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM, HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2007/2008, Foreword (Palgrave 2007).

5. The reference here to “peoples” is based on the Rawlsian hypothesis of the law of peoples in preference to an analysis based on the law of nations.

6. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Harvard Univ. Press 1999).

CEES Energy Justice Conference

23-24 Oct 2009
Wolf Law Building
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado 80309

Conference Agenda