Poor Countries Need Relief from Climate Change. They Need Electricity More. (Bloomberg Businessweek)

From the Article:

"Last week, environmental campaigners walked out en masse from the U.N. climate talks taking place in Warsaw. The conference hadn’t been shaping up to be a great success: During the meetings, Japan announced that, rather than cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by one-quarter below 1990 levels, it would actually increase them by 3 percent, largely because of the country’s decision to end its nuclear program.

Campaigners pointed out that those with the most to lose from the failure of the climate talks are the world’s poorest people—certain to suffer the greatest impact of the floods, droughts, and rising temperatures that climate change is bringing. At the same time, the world’s poorest people are also those with the lowest access to modern sources of energy such as electricity and natural gas. In order to foster economic growth and improvements in health, developing countries will need to generate huge amounts of additional power. How to achieve considerable reductions in carbon dioxide at a time of massive increases in global energy consumption is of the most complex—and urgent—challenges facing policymakers in the developed world."

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