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Power to the people
OPINION
Power to the people Getting electricity to the world’s poor is vital to global prosperity. Shame nobody can agree on how to do it, says Fred Pearce THIS year the World Bank approved a big grant for the latest phase of the world’s largest hydroelectric scheme. The Inga 3 dam is part of a megaproject on the Congo river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). With construction due to begin next year, the project could one day deliver twice as much electricity as the world’s current largest power station, the Three Gorges dam in China. The World Bank regards the $37 million grant as money well spent on a landmark scheme that will help bring grid electricity to the 90 per cent of Congolese who lack it. Most environmentalists and many in the aid community disagree. They say the dam is a white elephant and that its power will mainly benefit urban elites, mining companies and the export market. What the DRC’s poor need, they say, is decentralised, low-carbon energy sources such as solar panels. The disagreement over Inga 3 is a microcosm of a wider debate about how best to bring electricity to people who lack it. And the argument is not just pitting the likes of the World Bank against environmentalists. The Breakthrough Institute, a California environmental think tank known for its iconoclastic stance, recently published a report called Our High-Energy Planet. In it, co-author Alex Trembath argues that promoting solar panels and other low-carbon energy technologies is “neocolonialist, morally unacceptable and increasingly irrelevant”. The charge is that solar enthusiasts are 26 | NewScientist | 2 August 2014
sacrificing economic development and a radio but would be no good for anything more demanding, for the poor on the altar of their like boiling a kettle. Most Kenyans environmental concerns. would probably prefer to be The same debate surfaced at hooked up to centralised power, a recent meeting on low-carbon but the grid only reaches one-fifth energy, organised by the of the country. University of Sussex’s Sussex In other words, it is not obvious Energy Group at the Royal Society that low-carbon is necessarily proin London, where researchers presented an analysis of the spread poor. And its widespread adoption of domestic solar power in Kenya. might lock poor communities into a low-carbon future that is Over 300,000 homes are now fitted with panels, an achievement also low-energy and low-income. That is especially troubling if that the university’s David Ockwell the main argument for solar praised as an example of “propoor, low-carbon development”. “Low-carbon technologies Or is it? As Ockwell himself may lock poor communities remarked later in conversation, into a future that’s also lowa couple of panels on the roof can charge phones and run a few lights energy and low-income”
power is to tackle climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argues that reducing poverty is vital to helping poor communities become more resilient. So it would be criminal if green technologies were imposed on poor people to help hold back carbon emissions – only to leave them even more vulnerable. All this chimes with Harvard University international development specialist Calestous Juma’s argument that low-tech “solutions” to Africa’s energy problems are a continuation of disastrous 20th-century policies that led developing countries down paths of low-innovation that perpetuated poverty. Africa, Juma says, needs the latest technology, not “appropriate” technology. Which brings us back to the Breakthrough Institute’s report. It slams environment groups and aid agencies who make a fetish of off-grid, low-energy power while giving “big” low-carbon energy like nuclear and hydroelectric the thumbs down. The institute says this is both unethical and counterproductive. It argues that the world’s poor need a “massive expansion of energy systems” or they will be condemned to a future of continued poverty. The authors are not climatechange deniers; they agree that low-carbon energy is essential. Nor are they free-market fanatics: only public investment, they say, gets power to the poor. But they insist that industrialising, urbanising and wiring up societies is the only way of delivering a prosperous,
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist
One minute interview
Big cats in the city Humans and leopards really can coexist around big cities. We just need to understand their ways, says Vidya Athreya Just last week a leopard was on the Indian Insitute of Technology campus in Mumbai. What happens when a sighting is reported? Thanks to the Wildlife Protection Act of India, leopards cannot be killed. If a leopard is sighted but hasn’t attacked anyone, most often it used to be captured and released elsewhere – usually in the SGNP. But we found that this practice could lead to attacks on humans near the release sites, so we are trying to discourage this approach.
Profile Vidya Athreya is an ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society-India. She studies humanleopard interactions in heavily populated areas. Her research formed the plot of the Bollywood movie Ajoba , released in Mumbai this summer
What happened with Ajoba – the leopard whose story is the basis of a new film? In 2009, a leopard in Maharashtra in western India fell into a village well while chasing a dog. My team captured him, named him Ajoba (“grandfather” in Marathi), fitted him with a GPS collar, then released him in a forest 60 kilometres away. Without harming a single human, in the next month he did a 120 km trek – crossing the Mumbai-Agra highway and passing through two other protected areas before he settled in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), Mumbai. Are leopards moving to urban areas now? Leopards have lived in the SGNP for a long time. But today, the city has crept north and is besieging this park. Around most buildings near the park where leopards have been seen on CCTV or photographed, we’ve noticed an abundance of dogs – known prey for these nocturnal hunters. Residential areas with piles of garbage attract stray dogs and pigs, which, in turn, attract the leopards.
Why does translocation cause problems? Wild animals generally fear humans so much that their first reaction is to freeze or slink away. But leopards are highly territorial – they know their areas well. If you take such a cat and go dump it in a new place, it gets stressed. There are other local leopards, and it does not know where it can get food or water. Meanwhile, humans are abundant near these areas – so chances of conflict increase. Yet since capture-and-release has decreased, there have been only a few attacks on humans. Can people and leopards coexist in Mumbai? They already do. Wildlife living among people, even a potentially dangerous species like leopard, is not a new phenomenon in India. Big cats survive because the rural populace tends to be tolerant. Even around the SGNP in Mumbai, where people live in open houses without concrete walls, for example, they seem more willing to share their space. But this isn’t always the case in high-rises. Informing apartment dwellers about the ways of these big cats is invaluable so they don’t pressure parks to set traps. Whether leopards visit these buildings or not is largely in their hands. And what became of our hero, Ajoba? In 2011, he was killed on a highway on a jaunt out of the SGNP. Things are changing fast in India in terms of vehicular traffic. Protected areas are important, but leopards have large ranges. As India expands its roads and railways, we need to build wildlife bridges and underpasses to ensure that Ajoba’s kin don’t end up as roadkill. Interview by Vijaysree Venkatraman
2 August 2014 | NewScientist | 27
www.projectwaghoba.in
low-carbon future. “Moving to a high-energy planet is a moral imperative.” Or, to put it another way, bring on the Inga dams and ditch the solar panels. This is a critical debate right now, with the United Nations making a global push to deliver electricity to the billion people who still lack it. Governments in many poor countries are handing out cheap, Chinese-made solar panels to millions of homes. I have seen them in recent months in Mali and Guyana, for instance. The trouble is that neither side is wholly convincing. The Breakthrough report has little to say about the implications of its strategy for the climate. The small-is-beautiful crowd, meanwhile, have yet to explain where their endless expanses of solar panels will take the poor. Large hydroelectric projects are not the answer either. Earlier this year, Bent Flyvbjerg at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School published an analysis of 245 such schemes built between 1934 and 2007. It concluded that dams are mostly financial millstones: completed years late, almost 100 per cent over budget, and delivering less economic return than they cost to build. Recent dams are no better than older ones, and the bigger they are, the worse they perform (Energy Policy, vol 69, p 43). This doesn’t augur well for Inga. There are no easy answers. We need more than rhetoric to be sure that low-carbon technologies are not developed at the expense of the poor. We need more voices from the people of Africa saying what they want. What must be avoided at all costs is Africa stumbling into a future of cheap coal to power its cities and cheap solar panels for rural areas. With ever more people leaving the countryside for the cities, that does not sound like a good solution. n
Power to the people Getting electricity to the world’s poor is vital to global prosperity. Shame nobody can agree on how to do it, says Fred Pearce THIS year the World Bank approved a big grant for the latest phase of the world’s largest hydroelectric scheme. The Inga 3 dam is part of a megaproject on the Congo river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). With construction due to begin next year, the project could one day deliver twice as much electricity as the world’s current largest power station, the Three Gorges dam in China. The World Bank regards the $37 million grant as money well spent on a landmark scheme that will help bring grid electricity to the 90 per cent of Congolese who lack it. Most environmentalists and many in the aid community disagree. They say the dam is a white elephant and that its power will mainly benefit urban elites, mining companies and the export market. What the DRC’s poor need, they say, is decentralised, low-carbon energy sources such as solar panels. The disagreement over Inga 3 is a microcosm of a wider debate about how best to bring electricity to people who lack it. And the argument is not just pitting the likes of the World Bank against environmentalists. The Breakthrough Institute, a California environmental think tank known for its iconoclastic stance, recently published a report called Our High-Energy Planet. In it, co-author Alex Trembath argues that promoting solar panels and other low-carbon energy technologies is “neocolonialist, morally unacceptable and increasingly irrelevant”. The charge is that solar enthusiasts are 26 | NewScientist | 2 August 2014
sacrificing economic development and a radio but would be no good for anything more demanding, for the poor on the altar of their like boiling a kettle. Most Kenyans environmental concerns. would probably prefer to be The same debate surfaced at hooked up to centralised power, a recent meeting on low-carbon but the grid only reaches one-fifth energy, organised by the of the country. University of Sussex’s Sussex In other words, it is not obvious Energy Group at the Royal Society that low-carbon is necessarily proin London, where researchers presented an analysis of the spread poor. And its widespread adoption of domestic solar power in Kenya. might lock poor communities into a low-carbon future that is Over 300,000 homes are now fitted with panels, an achievement also low-energy and low-income. That is especially troubling if that the university’s David Ockwell the main argument for solar praised as an example of “propoor, low-carbon development”. “Low-carbon technologies Or is it? As Ockwell himself may lock poor communities remarked later in conversation, into a future that’s also lowa couple of panels on the roof can charge phones and run a few lights energy and low-income”
power is to tackle climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argues that reducing poverty is vital to helping poor communities become more resilient. So it would be criminal if green technologies were imposed on poor people to help hold back carbon emissions – only to leave them even more vulnerable. All this chimes with Harvard University international development specialist Calestous Juma’s argument that low-tech “solutions” to Africa’s energy problems are a continuation of disastrous 20th-century policies that led developing countries down paths of low-innovation that perpetuated poverty. Africa, Juma says, needs the latest technology, not “appropriate” technology. Which brings us back to the Breakthrough Institute’s report. It slams environment groups and aid agencies who make a fetish of off-grid, low-energy power while giving “big” low-carbon energy like nuclear and hydroelectric the thumbs down. The institute says this is both unethical and counterproductive. It argues that the world’s poor need a “massive expansion of energy systems” or they will be condemned to a future of continued poverty. The authors are not climatechange deniers; they agree that low-carbon energy is essential. Nor are they free-market fanatics: only public investment, they say, gets power to the poor. But they insist that industrialising, urbanising and wiring up societies is the only way of delivering a prosperous,
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist
One minute interview
Big cats in the city Humans and leopards really can coexist around big cities. We just need to understand their ways, says Vidya Athreya Just last week a leopard was on the Indian Insitute of Technology campus in Mumbai. What happens when a sighting is reported? Thanks to the Wildlife Protection Act of India, leopards cannot be killed. If a leopard is sighted but hasn’t attacked anyone, most often it used to be captured and released elsewhere – usually in the SGNP. But we found that this practice could lead to attacks on humans near the release sites, so we are trying to discourage this approach.
Profile Vidya Athreya is an ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society-India. She studies humanleopard interactions in heavily populated areas. Her research formed the plot of the Bollywood movie Ajoba , released in Mumbai this summer
What happened with Ajoba – the leopard whose story is the basis of a new film? In 2009, a leopard in Maharashtra in western India fell into a village well while chasing a dog. My team captured him, named him Ajoba (“grandfather” in Marathi), fitted him with a GPS collar, then released him in a forest 60 kilometres away. Without harming a single human, in the next month he did a 120 km trek – crossing the Mumbai-Agra highway and passing through two other protected areas before he settled in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), Mumbai. Are leopards moving to urban areas now? Leopards have lived in the SGNP for a long time. But today, the city has crept north and is besieging this park. Around most buildings near the park where leopards have been seen on CCTV or photographed, we’ve noticed an abundance of dogs – known prey for these nocturnal hunters. Residential areas with piles of garbage attract stray dogs and pigs, which, in turn, attract the leopards.
Why does translocation cause problems? Wild animals generally fear humans so much that their first reaction is to freeze or slink away. But leopards are highly territorial – they know their areas well. If you take such a cat and go dump it in a new place, it gets stressed. There are other local leopards, and it does not know where it can get food or water. Meanwhile, humans are abundant near these areas – so chances of conflict increase. Yet since capture-and-release has decreased, there have been only a few attacks on humans. Can people and leopards coexist in Mumbai? They already do. Wildlife living among people, even a potentially dangerous species like leopard, is not a new phenomenon in India. Big cats survive because the rural populace tends to be tolerant. Even around the SGNP in Mumbai, where people live in open houses without concrete walls, for example, they seem more willing to share their space. But this isn’t always the case in high-rises. Informing apartment dwellers about the ways of these big cats is invaluable so they don’t pressure parks to set traps. Whether leopards visit these buildings or not is largely in their hands. And what became of our hero, Ajoba? In 2011, he was killed on a highway on a jaunt out of the SGNP. Things are changing fast in India in terms of vehicular traffic. Protected areas are important, but leopards have large ranges. As India expands its roads and railways, we need to build wildlife bridges and underpasses to ensure that Ajoba’s kin don’t end up as roadkill. Interview by Vijaysree Venkatraman
2 August 2014 | NewScientist | 27
www.projectwaghoba.in
low-carbon future. “Moving to a high-energy planet is a moral imperative.” Or, to put it another way, bring on the Inga dams and ditch the solar panels. This is a critical debate right now, with the United Nations making a global push to deliver electricity to the billion people who still lack it. Governments in many poor countries are handing out cheap, Chinese-made solar panels to millions of homes. I have seen them in recent months in Mali and Guyana, for instance. The trouble is that neither side is wholly convincing. The Breakthrough report has little to say about the implications of its strategy for the climate. The small-is-beautiful crowd, meanwhile, have yet to explain where their endless expanses of solar panels will take the poor. Large hydroelectric projects are not the answer either. Earlier this year, Bent Flyvbjerg at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School published an analysis of 245 such schemes built between 1934 and 2007. It concluded that dams are mostly financial millstones: completed years late, almost 100 per cent over budget, and delivering less economic return than they cost to build. Recent dams are no better than older ones, and the bigger they are, the worse they perform (Energy Policy, vol 69, p 43). This doesn’t augur well for Inga. There are no easy answers. We need more than rhetoric to be sure that low-carbon technologies are not developed at the expense of the poor. We need more voices from the people of Africa saying what they want. What must be avoided at all costs is Africa stumbling into a future of cheap coal to power its cities and cheap solar panels for rural areas. With ever more people leaving the countryside for the cities, that does not sound like a good solution. n