Dirty Energy vs. So-Called "Dirty" Solutions

In this article, the author discussed the poverty that threatens the health of 2 billion people. Of course, we get the standard Religion of the Environment/Class Warfare line about the rich people using up all the world's clean energy. But, if you can read the story and remove the crap, you can actually learn something.

See there are a lot of people living in absolute poverty, burning cow dung because that is all they have. Yet, this article focuses on the wrong thing, slightly mentioned near the end. The calls to "Save the Environment" are not going to help these people (as the article sort of quotes a guy), but neither will a focus on providing clean energy to these people. As the U.S. has gotten richer, our country has gotten cleaner. But, you really can't skip the pollution phase, just mitigate it. These people will live in poverty unless the global economy can help them. And the global economy can't help them if the rich nations try to make themselves poor to appease the Religion of the Environment.

Now, there is quite a bit of class warfare going on in this article. I wonder though, with all the money the quoted guy has, what would happen if he moved to an area of extreme poverty and tried to buy electricity? It wouldn't work. Guess what? You can get electricity to poverty-stricken areas without cutting down trees and running cables.

It actually all comes down to what is the best way to help people. This author gives one way. Most worthwhile economists would give another solution. Needless to say, the Religion of the Environment folks aren't doing the extremely poor people any favors.