Coal power will not cure poverty - World Bank

The argument for decades is that the greenies and climate change proponents are holding back developing countries from using their own fossil fuel resources (or ours) to get electricity and energy, thereby sentencing the countries to be forever in poverty. This requires the assumption that green energy isn't a plausible alternative.

Well times have well and truly changed. Green energy efficiency is improving hugely of late, with large amounts of global investment money being poured into developing it further. It's now possible to not even have to construct a national electricity grid for example with the latest advances in solar power and battery storage. Indeed it's now far mor cost effective to set up solar systems for remote communities than to string kilometres of wires from a power plant. This will only improve as time goes on, the costs of clean energy becoming cheaper and cheaper.

Now the World Bank has come out and said categorically that it rejects the argument that not mining coal is to keep developing nations in poverty. That in fact climate change is instead the cause of poverty.

Coal, oil and gas companies have pushed back against efforts to fight climate change by arguing fossil fuels are a cure to “energy poverty”, which is holding back developing countries. 

Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest privately held coal company, went so far as to claim that coal would have prevented the spread of the Ebola virus. 

However, Kyte said that when it came to lifting countries out of poverty, coal was part of the problem – and not part of a broader solution. 

“Do I think coal is the solution to poverty? There are more than 1 billion people today who have no access to energy,” Kyte said. Hooking them up to a coal-fired grid would not on its own wreck the planet, she went on. 

But Kyte added: “If they all had access to coal-fired power tomorrow their respiratory illness rates would go up, etc, etc … We need to extend access to energy to the poor and we need to do it the cleanest way possible because the social costs of coal are uncounted and damaging, just as the global emissions count is damaging as well.” 

The World Bank sees climate change as a driver of poverty, threatening decades of development. more