Could you live without electricity?

Text I

Could you live without electricity?

1.6 billion are in the dark, using dirty fuels to get by

Earth Day has come and gone, but it’s a fact of daily — and especially nightly — life that 1.6 billion people around the globe have no electricity in their homes. Instead, most use wood, coal or even dung to heat and cook their homes — resulting in indoor air pollution that kills 1.6 million people a year.

It’s not expected to improve much, and in Africa it’s predicted to worsen.

By 2030, when Earth’s population will likely top 8 billion, 1.3 billion people will still lack electricity, the International Energy Agency estimates. Of those, 700 million will be in Africa, and 490 million in South Asia.

Case in point: Ghana, in West Africa, where most of the northern half of the country lives without lights. A decade ago, Ghana’s government launched a campaign to electrify the rural north but, except for periodic jumpstarts during election season, it has languished. As a result, three out of four Ghanans in the north are without electricity to refrigerate with, to cook with, to study with, to start businesses with.

Like most others around the world in the same situation, these Ghanans use traditional fuels (wood, coal, dung) to meet their cooking needs. The World Health Organization estimates that using those fuels, which also releases greenhouse gases, is responsible for 1.5 million deaths per year — most of them children and women.

What would electricity for everyone around the globe cost? The International Energy Agency, which is made up of 28 member countries, figures it would run $35 billion a year from 2008 to 2030 to reach that.

The United Nations (UN) has taken up the issue, organizing a summit on April 28 hosted by Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon. “Energy services are essential for meeting basic human needs, reducing poverty, creating and accumulating wealth and sustaining advances in social development,” he said in announcing the summit. “Access to adequate, affordable and basic modern energy services is thus crucial to achieving sustainable human development.”

In a video report, Peter DiCampo shows what life without lights is like in Ghana as he follows residents into their darkness and reveals their attempts to improvise. “Whenever they post teachers in our schools, the teachers don’t want to stay because we don’t have lights”, said one resident DiCampo interviewed. However, in the same region, mobile phones are widespread, and a growing local film industry allows northerners to see movies in a setting and language familiar to them for the first time. All of this exists despite the absence of a convenient outlet in which to plug basic electronic appliances.

© 2010 msnbc.com http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36712257/ns/world_news-world_ environment/ Retrieved June 4, 2010. (slightly adapted)

Text II

Nigeria: 1.5 Billion People Live Without Electricity

24 November 2009

A new UN report says more than a quarter of the global population, or 1.5 billion people live without electricity.

The report also said that 80 per cent of the people live in the least developed countries (LDCs) of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The report was produced in partnership with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Health Organisation (WHO), with support from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

According to the report, to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015, 1.2 billion more people will need access to electricity. It also stated that two billion more people will need access to modern fuels like natural gas or Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), also called propane. It noted that two million people die every year from causes associated with exposure to smoke from cooking with biomass and coal, while 99 per cent of those deaths occur in developing countries.

The report further said that, “in LDCs and sub- Saharan Africa, half of all deaths from pneumonia in children under five years, chronic lung disease and lung cancer in adults are attributed to the use of solid fuel, compared with 38 per cent in developing countries overall”.

“The time has come to make hard choices to combat climate change and enhance global energy security, and at the same time, we should not forget 1.5 billion people who have no access to electricity in the developing world,” Fatih Birol, chief economist of IEA, said in the report.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200911260385.html, retrieved June 7, 2010

Both Text I and Text II