The Energy Crisis in a New Light

The "Poor People's Energy Outlook 2014" really illuminates the energy crisis that we all face in a light that not all of us get to see it in. When we think of a crisis, naturally, we think about how it would affect ourselves. However, this report seeks to extend our understanding of it to include its effects on those who live in poverty and the very simple changes that could be made in order to lessen it severity. For example, did you know that about 23% of all of the soot produced in the world comes from inefficient stoves? Soot, also known as "black carbon," is the second-most powerful driving force in climate change at the moment, behind carbon dioxide. Luckily, it washes away in the rain, but if it were not created in the first place, then there would be a sizable difference in the pace of global warming. Stoves are a good place to start because we already know what fuel we can use so that they burn cleanly - alcohol, gasoline, and electricity all produce almost no unhealthy by-products. Unfortunately, most of the time none of the three are readily available in developing countries, where they would make the most impact. Before reading the report, I had thought that it was limitations in existing technology that ushered forth climate change, but that is not entirely true, which surprised me. We have the technology to reduce the amount of soot in the atmosphere by roughly 23%. However, the infrastructure is not there - people in developing countries using inefficient stoves oftentimes cannot afford the more expensive fuels or there is simply no way for them to obtain the fuels due to a lack of suppliers. Therefore, one way to help ameliorate both the energy crisis and climate change (which I did not even think of before) is to usher forth globalization so that there is enough infrastructure to spread eco-friendly resources around the world.