Global institutions are choosing energy poverty over fossil fuels

Energy is always a hot topic. Yet there’s one aspect about energy that barely attracts attention these days: energy poverty.

Development used to dominate discussions about emerging economies. But in the past ten years it seems to have fallen off the radar, replaced by climate change concerns and renewable energy advocacy.

One region in particular has been hard hit by this trend: sub-Saharan Africa, where access to electricity has declined.

To help put this issue back on the agenda, Brenda Shaffer joins Inside Policy Talks. Shaffer, an international energy and foreign policy specialist, is a faculty member at the US Naval Postgraduate School and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center in Washington, DC. She’s also the author of a new paper published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, titled (Dis)empowering Africa: How the West’s energy policies fuel poverty in the continent.

On the podcast, Shaffer tells Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources, and environment at MLI, that societies without access to fuels like oil and gas are left using energy sources like coal, wood, and dung – fuels that cause the highest carbon emissions, have greatest negative impact on human heath, and require mass deforestation.

“No matter what, people are going to consume energy” for uses like cooking, heating, and water purification, says Shaffer. Yet a religious-like opposition to oil and gas has made it so international institutions “just can’t think of funding fossil fuels,” she explains, even in regions where they would serve as alternatives to the most polluting forms of energy.