Recently the US Environmental Protection Agency released draft standards for limiting the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from existing power plants. The president, other administration officials and the media coverage, should remind us of the human and climate costs of fossil fuels and the difficulty of changing from our old energy path. For 200 years the USand Europe have built their wealth with fossil fuels. Meanwhile the poor — whether they live near a coalmine in the mountains of Appalachia or in developing countries — have suffered without sharing the prosperity. Even though we now know the costs of inaction on climate change, there are still some who argue that we have a moral duty to provide developing countries with cheap fossil fuels.
As a person of faith, I believe that climate change is the greatest moral issue of our time. By any spiritual or ethical standard, inaction on climate change is immoral and unjust. All faith traditions consider the natural world sacred and call upon their adherents to care for creation and the most vulnerable among us, as Pope Francis has so eloquently reminded us. The energy path we choose has profound moral implications. Energy poverty in the developing world is a moral issue, but fossil fuels are neither a moral nor practical response.
The most vulnerable people are suffering from climate change now. Rising sea levels make coastal and river flooding worse from Pakistan to Shanghai. Increased rainfall is changing the patterns of diseases like malaria.
Storms such as Typhoon Haiyan and Superstorm Sandy are arriving on seas made higher by climate change, meaning that the storm surges they produce cause more infrastructure damage and property loss, and disrupt or endanger more lives. Drought in South Sudan fuels conflict. In the American West, climate change fuels more and earlier forest fires. The old fossil fuel energy path has led us here and will only bring more suffering.
The assertion that fossil fuels are cheap evaporates on examination. Fossil fuels used to generate electricity impose huge externalities, costs borne by the earth and its people. From the environmental and social devastation of mountain top removal and oil spills, to pollution and health problems caused by burning coal and disposing of mining waste and sludge, fossil fuels are expensive stuff. Meanwhile, renewable energy creates very few of these dangerous externalities. Furthermore, renewable energy rarely has fuel costs. Whereas coal, oil and natural gas all cost money, renewable energy is fueled by free sources including wind and sun.
Renewable energy also lends itself to small-scale local generation that doesn't depend on a grid. By contrast, fossil fuels require huge capital investment in centralized power plants and a fully developed grid. Renewable energy gives developing countries the option of having a distributed power system. In telecommunications, Africa skipped the capital-intensive landline system used by developed countries and went straight to a mobile phone system. There is no reason why Africa cannot make a similar choice for energy, skipping the old, capital-intensive system and relying on renewable energy from the start.
Cook stoves demonstrate the practical and sustainable benefits of following a moral energy path based on renewables in developing countries. According to the Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves, three billion people cook and heat with open fires, and two hundred million of them die every year from respiratory disease. Children and women suffer most. Most of the families using open fires live in rural areas with no access to electricity. Poor people in and around cities rarely have access to the electric grid either, and those who do often cannot afford electric stoves or a monthly electric bill.
A new coal-fired electric power plant will do little for people who don't have access to the electric grid, whereas an annual investment of $4.5bn, far less than the cost of such a plant, could solve the problem of access to clean cook stoves worldwide. For example, South Africa recently built the 4,800-megawatt Medupi coal-fired power plant for $10.75bn.
That investment could have funded the clean cook stove campaign for more than two years. Cancelling a few more coal-fired plants and eliminating the need for a rural electric grid could liberate the funding needed to expand clean cook stove accessibility, improve the health of poor people around the world and reduce carbon pollution from open fires and fossil fuels. Although the challenges of energy poverty and rural electrification can't be solved by cook stoves alone they are a great example of a win-win solution and demonstrate a more moral answer to the energy and climate crises we face.
Our faith and our sense of justice call us to follow a moral energy path, by investing in clean, renewable energy, including clean cook stoves, not the costly fossil fuel energy system of the past. We owe it to the most vulnerable among us, to future generations and the planet to follow this path.
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