Energy from My Backyard - The Renaissance of Renewable Energy - page 245

largelyexhaustedinOECDcountries,somostfutureexpansionisexpectedtooccurinAsia
and Latin America.
7.7 Energy and Development
As a child growing up in Italy in the 1970s, I went to the cinema in my home city most
Sundays. At that time the choice of snacks and soft drinks in the kiosk at the entrance was
limited. Popcorn came in a 50-gram bag and soft drinks in a 200-milliliter glass bottle.
Today, it's not unusual to see youngsters head into one of the ten theatres at the shiny new
multiplex clutching a drum of popcorn large enough to bathe an infant in, and a litre of
Coke in a giant plastic cup. Are the children with the supersize portions or greater choice
of movies better off in any real sense? Might they actually be worse off? According to
the World Health Organization, type 2 diabetes, largely the result of obesity and physical
inactivity, claims 3.4 million lives per year and is likely to be the seventh leading cause
of death by 2030. The two predicted leading causes of death by 2030 - heart disease and
stroke - are also linked to poor eating and exercise habits (WHO 2013 ) .
According to United Nations population projections, by 2050 the Earth will be home
to more than 9 billion human beings. Nearly all the population increase during the next
four decades will occur in developing countries, particularly Africa and South Asia.
Urbanization will continue at an accelerated pace, reaching 70 per cent in 2050. Income
levels will be multiples of what they are today, and in order to feed this larger, urban,
and wealthier population, global food production will need to increase by 70 per cent
(FAO 2009 , 2011a ) . 13 This will require more cropland, water, fuels, buildings, industrial
processes, transportation, and social services (Biello 2011b ) . It will also entail increased
energy production, greater interference with the environment, and worrying social issues.
More than a third of the world's people currently rely on wood, dung or animal waste
to cook their food, and 20 per cent still lack access to electricity. Smoke inhalation from
cooking with traditional biomass causes lung diseases that kill nearly 2 million people a
year,most ofthem women and children. Avoidance oflung disease is not the only reason to
move away from traditional biomass. Modern fuels for cooking and heating relieve women
of the drudgery and dangers associated with foraging for wood, while electricity allows
water to be pumped for crops, foods and medicines to be refrigerated, and children to study
after dark.