Ashura9
JF-Expert Member
- Oct 21, 2012
- 740
- 485
Energy to Fuel Poverty Reduction
Imagine life without energy. No energy to power a light bulb, mobile phone, or fridge. In fact, about 1.3 billion people -- 18 percent of the world’s population -- don’t need to imagine. That’s what life is like for them every day.
If we had to sum up history in one sentence it would be: “Life gets better -- not for everyone all the time, but for most people most of the time.” And one of the biggest reasons is energy. For thousands of years, people burned wood for fuel. Their lives were, by and large, short and hard. But when people started using coal in the 1800s, life started getting better a lot faster. Pretty soon we had lights, skyscrapers, elevators, air conditioning, cars, planes, and all the other things that make up modern life.
Without access to energy, the poor are stuck in the dark, denied all of the economic, social, and health benefits that come with power. So if we really want to help the world’s poorest families, we need to find a way to get them access to energy they can afford. And we need to do it in a way that doesn’t make climate change worse, because the poor are more vulnerable to extreme weather and other climate impacts than anyone else.
To produce much more cheap, clean energy, we must make better use of existing technologies, such as solar and wind. Even more important, we’re going to need a massive amount of research into thousands of new ideas. Today, the U.S. government is the largest funder of energy R&D, and yet we’re still woefully underinvesting. In fact, consumers spend more on gasoline in a week than the government spends on clean-energy research in a year!
To help trigger a big increase in R&D, I recently helped launch an effort by more than two dozen private citizens that will complement government research being done by several countries. Some of the crazier inventions that I'm excited about are a possible way to use solar energy to produce fuel, much like plants use sunlight to make food for themselves, and batteries the size of swimming pools with huge storage capacity.
Few of the crazy ideas will pay off. But we’re betting that within 15 years, scientists and engineers will develop big breakthroughs that will put us on a path to zero carbon emissions and make energy more affordable for everyone.
Source : Gatesnotes
Imagine life without energy. No energy to power a light bulb, mobile phone, or fridge. In fact, about 1.3 billion people -- 18 percent of the world’s population -- don’t need to imagine. That’s what life is like for them every day.
If we had to sum up history in one sentence it would be: “Life gets better -- not for everyone all the time, but for most people most of the time.” And one of the biggest reasons is energy. For thousands of years, people burned wood for fuel. Their lives were, by and large, short and hard. But when people started using coal in the 1800s, life started getting better a lot faster. Pretty soon we had lights, skyscrapers, elevators, air conditioning, cars, planes, and all the other things that make up modern life.
Without access to energy, the poor are stuck in the dark, denied all of the economic, social, and health benefits that come with power. So if we really want to help the world’s poorest families, we need to find a way to get them access to energy they can afford. And we need to do it in a way that doesn’t make climate change worse, because the poor are more vulnerable to extreme weather and other climate impacts than anyone else.
To produce much more cheap, clean energy, we must make better use of existing technologies, such as solar and wind. Even more important, we’re going to need a massive amount of research into thousands of new ideas. Today, the U.S. government is the largest funder of energy R&D, and yet we’re still woefully underinvesting. In fact, consumers spend more on gasoline in a week than the government spends on clean-energy research in a year!
To help trigger a big increase in R&D, I recently helped launch an effort by more than two dozen private citizens that will complement government research being done by several countries. Some of the crazier inventions that I'm excited about are a possible way to use solar energy to produce fuel, much like plants use sunlight to make food for themselves, and batteries the size of swimming pools with huge storage capacity.
Few of the crazy ideas will pay off. But we’re betting that within 15 years, scientists and engineers will develop big breakthroughs that will put us on a path to zero carbon emissions and make energy more affordable for everyone.
Source : Gatesnotes
