Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
For developing countries, the challenge is even bigger. They are being
asked to steer a very different course in fuelling their economic develop-
ment - not along the well-worn fossil-fuel track already taken by indus-
trialized countries before them, but along the steep upward path of energy
innovation to a new low-carbon system. The response of developing
nations to the developed ones can be loosely summed up as: “After you”.
It is impossible to grasp the reluctance of people to move beyond fossil
fuels without understanding their extraordinary convenience. The human
race has quite literally grown with successive forms of progressively more
convenient hydrocarbons. Change in forms of energy has played a part in
population growth. Coal for heat, light and power reduced the pressures
that earlier dependence on biomass had placed on land for growing wood
and feeding draught animals. Oil provided the input for the fertilizers,
pesticides and ploughing needed to feed larger populations - quite apart
from the synthetic materials clothing them, the fuel for their mobility
and the plastics put to every conceivable use. Moreover, electricity - two-
thirds of which is generated by hydrocarbons - provides instantaneous
energy at the flick of a switch.
It is because fossil fuels are so versatile and such a good store of energy
that we seem to be determined to hang on to our hydrocarbon status quo
for as long as possible. So it is all too plausible for the International Energy
Agency to predict that, without a radical change in present policies, the
fossil-fuel share of total energy will still continue to hover around the
eighty percent mark by 2030.
At the same time, however, it is not possible to understand the desire
of many poor countries to complete their development in the traditional
fossil-fuelled way without grasping how the energy status quo is sheer
drudgery for many of their citizens. An estimated 1.5bn people have no
electricity (see p.101) - two-thirds of them in Asia, the rest in Africa and
mostly in the countryside. Most of them do not even have access to the
relatively unpolluting products such as kerosene or liquid petroleum gas
for cooking.
As much as eighty percent of India's population depends on firewood
for cooking. This involves mainly women and children spending several
hours a day collecting wood or dung for cooking fires. It is not just back-
breaking work and an avoidable waste of their time. It also leads to defor-
estation and is a waste of resources: dung, for instance, could be used as
organic fertilizer.
