By focusing primarily on renewables, instead of gas, millions of poor go unserved. Is it fair to use climate policies to keep poor people poor?

Access to cheap and abundant power is one of the best ways to lift people out of poverty. Analyses show that there is a clear connection between growth and energy availability in Africa. Most spectacularly, China lifted 680 million people out of poverty over the past 30 years — not through expensive wind and solar, but through cheap, if polluting, coal.

Nonetheless, many rich opinion leaders feel comfortable in declaring that the trade-off for cheap energy and development is not in the interest of the poor. The United States, United Kingdom and other European countries announced last year that they won't support international finance for coal-fired power plants in developing countries.

These nations abstained last time the World Bank helped finance the Medupi coal-fired power plant in 2010 in South Africa. Today, they would have voted it down. Yet, Medupi will provide 10% of South African electricity and avoid rolling blackouts. The South African finance minister made the argument clearly: "To sustain the growth rates we need to create jobs, we have no choice but to build new generating capacity — relying on what, for now, remains our most abundant and affordable energy source: coal."

The Obama administration even acknowledged that without a coal power plant South Africa's "economic recovery will suffer, adversely impacting electrification, job creation, and social indicators." Yet, now we tell the world's poor, that they shouldn't get cheap energy.

Nowhere is the dilemma more acute than in Obama's laudable Power Africa initiative, which aims to increase electricity generation and access to modern energy services in six poor, African countries.

This matters, because almost half the world's inhabitants or about 3 billion people burn dung, cardboard and twigs inside their houses to cook and keep warm. The consequent indoor air pollution kills 3.5 million people each year making it the world's deadliest environmental issue.

Allowing these poor countries to get electricity access could get rid of this indoor air pollution while doing an amazing amount of good. It could allow families light to read at night, a computer to get in touch with the world and a refrigerator to keep food from spoiling. It would also allow businesses to produce more competitively, providing jobs and economic progress.

But the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the main U.S. development finance institution, prefers mainly to invest in solar, wind and other low-emissions energy projects. Over the past five years, OPIC has invested in more than 40 new energy projects and all but two were in renewables.

This matters, because investments in renewables cost much more and it is harder to attract co-investors.

A new paper by Todd Moss and Ben Leo from the nonprofit think tank, Center for Global Development, puts it very clearly. If Obama spends the next $10 billion on gas electrification, he can help lift 90 million people out of poverty. If he only uses renewables, the same $10 billion can help just 20 million-27 million people. Using renewables, we will deliberately choose to leave more than 60 million people in darkness and poverty.

Of course, you can legitimately argue that cutting CO2 emissions is more important than helping poor people. But you cannot claim, as many greens would like to do, that there is no tradeoff — that you can magically achieve both lower CO2 emissions and still help more people.

It seems immoral to me to want to reduce CO2 emissions through denying the very poorest energy access while we in the West continue to get more than two-thirds of our much higher energy consumption from fossil fuels.

The only way to sustainably tackle global warming is to dramatically increase investment in green R&D which will eventually make green energy so cheap everyone will want to switch.

But right now, we have a moral responsibility to help lift as many people out of poverty as possible.

Our development aid should be used to help 60 million more people out of poverty, not as a tool to make us feel virtuous about facile, green choices.



Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.