"How Green Policies Hurt the Poor"

Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2014. Article is unavailable online without subscription.

Notable and Quotable

From environmental writer Bjorn Lomborg's "How Green Policies Hurt the Poor" for the Spectator (U.K.), April 5:

Africa is the renewable utopia, getting 50 per cent of its energy from renewables - thought nobody wants to emulate it.  In 1971, China derived 40 per cent of its energy from renewables.  Since then, it has powered its incredible growth almost exclusively on heavily polluting coal, lift in a historic 680 million people out of poverty.  Today, China gets a trifling 0.23 percent of its energy from  unreliable wind and solar.

Yet most Westerners still want to focus on putting up more inefficient solar panels in the developing world.  But this infatuation inflicts a real cost.  A recent analysis from the Centre for Global Development shows that $10 billion invested in such renewables would life 20 million people out of poverty.  It sounds impressive, until you learn that if this sum was spent on gas electrification it would lift 90 million people out of poverty.  So in choosing to spend that $10 billion on renewables, we deliberately end up choosing to leave more than 70 million people in darkness and poverty.