Blackouts remind us what life is like without electricity
by Paul K. Driessen
Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services
September 2003

WASHINGTON, DC, September 2003 ¾ The great Northeast power failure and Hurricane Isabel reminded millions of Americans what it’s like to be without electrical power.

Schools, offices, factories and water purification plants closed. Lights, computers, televisions, telephones, stoves, refrigerators, heating and air conditioning down for the count. Food spoiled and thrown out. For some, no water at all, for drinking, showers or flushing toilets.

The disruptions were massive, costly and aggravating. Imagine, then, what life must be like for two billion people – a third of the world’s population – that never have electricity, or have it only sporadically.

For starters, no electricity means water never comes from a tap. “It’s carried in cans, on heads or shoulders, maybe for miles,” Thompson Ayodele, director of Nigeria’s Institute of Public Policy Analysis, points out. “It comes from lakes and rivers that are filled with eroded soil and dangerous bacteria.” Drinking it often brings dysentery and other diseases that kill 4 million people a year.

No electricity also means “children and women must spend hours each day in the drudgery of collecting firewood or squatting in mud laced with animal feces and urine, to collect, dry and store manure for cooking, heat and light,” says Barun Mitra, president of the Liberty Institute of Delhi, India.  There’s little time to attend school or engage in more satisfying or productive economic activities.

Homes are thick with smoke from fires that belch soot, bacteria and toxic chemicals. Some 4 million infants and children die every year from this pollution – primarily from pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses. Asthma is rampant among women who make it to adulthood. Cancer plagues those lucky enough to survive asthma, dysentery, malaria, typhus and other serial killers that ravage their countries.

What electricity exists is often unreliable. Hospital power can go out in middle of surgery, and refrigerators can shut down for hours in 100-degree heat, causing vaccines and medicines to spoil, often without anyone realizing they are now worthless.

Having to rely on wood – instead of electricity from hydroelectric, coal, gas or nuclear plants – also harms the environment. Wood burning by poor families is a primary cause of urban air pollution and the infamous “brown cloud” that hovers over much of southeastern Asia.

“People cut down our trees, because they don’t have electricity,” says Gordon Mwesigye, a senior government official inKampala, Uganda. “Our soil erodes away, and the country will lose its wildlife habitats, and the health and economic benefits that abundant electricity brings.”

Even assuming there is electricity, and even at wages a fraction of those prevailing in the US, frequent power failures often drive worker productivity so low that Mexican and other plants cannot compete with their American counterparts, says Dean Kleckner, chairman of Truth about Trade and Technology.

Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity is the key to greater opportunity, prosperity, health and environmental quality in less developed countries, he emphasizes. Impoverished people in these countries desperately want better lives. As one Indian woman told a television news crew, “We don’t want to be encased like a museum.”

Environmental activists, however, are having none of this. Dams are bad for kayaking. Fossil fuels emit greenhouse gases. Nuclear – you’ve got to be kidding.

Many activists promote solar panels on huts and small wind turbines. While better than the “current” situation, this band-aid approach can never provide the electrical quantity or reliability that these communities and nations need – that is their basic human right.

For comfortable, healthy people in developed countries to suggest that such policies are ethical, socially responsible or environmentally beneficial is to engage in hypocrisy and delusion.

Even the notion that wind turbine farms are preferable to large-scale gas or coal generating plants is indefensible. A single 555-megawatt plant in California – sitting atop a mere ten acres – generates more electricity in a year than do all 13,000 of the state’s wind turbines, notes Reason Foundation scholar Ron Bailey.

The 300-foot tall windmills gobble up thousands of acres, mar once-scenic vistas, and kill thousands of birds every year. And the negative reaction that ultra-green Cape Cod residents like Ted and Patrick Kennedy have had to a proposed wind farm off their coast underscores what happens when renewable energy hype is about to become reality.

June Arunga, vice president of the Inter Region Economic Network of Kenya, may have put it best. Many environmentalists, she told me, would like things to “stay ‘exotic’ and ‘indigenous’ – underdeveloped and poor. But they never have to worry about malaria, or that there might not be food on the table.

“If they had to live the way we do, they would find themselves unable to escape the poverty that we in the poor countries know only too well. I don’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I wish our ‘friends’ would stop imposing it on us.”