کاهش فقر انرژی و کاهش تغییرات آب و هوایی: آیا تجارت کردنی وجود دارد ؟

Energy poverty alleviation has become an important political issue in the most recent years. Several initiatives and policies have been proposed to deal with poor access to modern sources of energy in many developing countries. Given the large number of people lacking basic energy services, an important question is whether providing universal access to modern energy could significantly increase energy demand and associated CO2 emissions. This paper provides one of the few formal assessments of this problem by means of a simple but robust model of current and future energy consumption. The model allows mapping energy consumption globally for different classes of energy use, quantifying current and future imbalances in the distribution of energy consumption. Our results indicate that an encompassing energy poverty eradication policy to be met by 2030 would increase global final energy consumption by about 7% (roughly 20 EJ). The same quantity of energy could be saved by reducing by 15% energy consumption of individuals with standards above current European levels. The additional energy infrastructure needed to eradicate energy poverty would produce 44–183 GtCO2 over the 21st century and contribute at most 0.13 °C of additional warming.

Understanding the distribution of current and future energy needs is an important goal for research and policy. On the one hand, lack of access to reliable energy is believed to hamper economic growth in poor economies. This is known as ‘energy poverty’, and has received increased political attention in most recent years. On the other hand, energy consumption met with the current fossil fuel based energy mix leads to emissions of greenhouse gases, which are accumulating in the atmosphere and are the major source of global climate change. Analyzing the extent to which these two global problems interact with each other would allow us to better understand which policy instruments can be put in place if both problems were to be tackled. The contribution of this paper is to provide some quantitative input to this discussion. We employ a reasonably simple model calibrated on data on consumption and income distributions, and show that it can replicate quite accurately the current distribution of final energy consumption by households. We use the model to assess the pressing policy issue of energy access to different parts of the society, and evaluate the impacts of energy poverty alleviation in terms of additional demand of energy and associated greenhouse gas emissions for different carbon intensity assumptions. Our tool is useful for mapping and representing global imbalances: we show that now the poorest 3 billion people have negligible energy consumption, and that the 1 billion people with energy consumption equal or above the European standards use 3/4th of total final energy. Taking as given the projections of international agencies such as the IEA, we show that in a Business as Usual scenario in 2030, minor changes would occur in the low energy consumption categories, with roughly the same number of people lacking access to basic human energy needs, though with an increased concentration in Africa. On the other hand, there will be a large number of additions in the higher energy consumption categories, mostly driven by economic development in the fast growing economies. We estimate the additional energy demand which would be required to eradicate energy poverty at about 20 EJ in 2030, less than 10% of the projected consumption in a BAU, and 15% of consumption of the most affluent categories. With different assumptions about the carbon intensity of energy infrastructure, this additional demand would generate carbon emissions over the century in the range of 44–183 GtCO2. This corresponds to a relatively minor contribution to global warming. Our analysis thus supports the thesis that energy poverty and climate change policies can be set independently from each other.

Modern sources of energy like electricity and clean cooking fuels are the prerequisite of a life with a minimal standard of comfort and dignity. There is a tremendous imbalance in the access to and consumption of these energy sources today: the poorest 3 billion people suffer from debilitating energy poverty while the richest 1 billion consume an overwhelming fraction. Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South East Asia are home to most of the world's energy poor. The projected growth under BAU will not lead to sufficient improvement in energy poverty eradication, especially in Africa. Countries like China will be successful in moving a significant number of people to higher energy consumption brackets. This paper proposes a simple model to quantify the number and global distribution of the energy poor, building on the data and methodologies developed to study income distribution. The model proposed in this paper is used to estimate the global distribution of energy consumption and its projected evolution in the next 30 years. It is useful for quantifying and mapping global imbalances. We show that a global energy poverty reduction policy aimed at providing 10 GJ energy per capita to the global energy poor would increase global energy demand by 7% in 2030; energy demand would increase substantially in some specific regions, most notably in Africa, where it would double. When accounting for the long lasting impacts of the needed energy infrastructure, we show that this policy would have a very small impact on climate change mitigation, even under scenarios where the additional energy infrastructure is carbon intensive. We estimate that the additional infrastructure will produce 44–183 GtCO2 over the 21st century and contribute at most 0.13 °C warming. This impact is manageable when combined with mitigation and efficiency improvements in other fields, and the management of these emissions would not pose a serious threat to the achievement of climate protection goals, unless these are very stringent. The benefits to human life and dignity of a successful energy poverty reduction will be immense. We must remind the reader that the model has several limitations. The robustness of the income-energy elasticity is not without some variance, although the sensitivity analysis shown in Appendix A provides qualitatively similar results. The estimates focus on access to modern energy, considering traditional energy as essentially useless, and thus results need further investigation. Finally, the real question is whether energy poverty alleviation and pro-poor growth policies will lead to significantly faster rise in the growth of middle classes and their substantially higher consumption and associated emissions. Recent history shows that there is no clear answer to this question, different countries having had different growth trajectories from similar starting points.