Editorial - Sustainable energy
Ashok Khosla

Next to the need to create sustainable livelihoods, the central issue facing society, North, South, East or West, is the need to create sustainable energy systems.  The question for which we now need an urgent answer is: “ how can each person on this, our one planet have access to adequate energy to make those livelihoods possible?”

Sustainable energy systems present a set of issues that is common to all nations and societies, at all stages of development.  They could provide a powerful synthesising, unifying concept that can bring the most disparate interests together to design more viable economic systems for the future in any country, rich or poor.

Our colleagues at the Wuppertal Institute in Germany have concluded that it is possible to live a life in the industrialised countries that provides the same “services” as today, but with a factor of 10 reduction in the use of materials and energy.  Indeed, it is not only possible, they say, but also essential if we are to avoid the massive destruction of our planet’s life support systems.

But we must also look at the flip side of that coin.  If such a massive reduction is to apply to the world as a whole, and on a sustainable basis in the long run, then it means that the countries of the South must make it through their demographic transition as soon as possible.  To achieve this, out work at Development Alternatives leads us to believe that the amount of energy used by the poor is also subject to a factor of 10 – but in their case it must in fact go up by this amount.  And it must do so NOW.  That seeming paradox is probably the only short cut we have to a sustainable future for the globe as a whole.

Neither today’s economic policies, nor our current technological choices are geared to promoting sustainable energy systems.  This certainly applies to the industrialised North; but here I am particularly concerned with the destiny of countries, like India, in the South.

“Global competitiveness’,  “comparative advantage’, “economies of scale”, “environmental externalities “ and other such shibboleths – the ultimate being the “free market” – based on simplistic (and entirely unrealistic) assumptions are concepts of neo-classical economics that do not easily translate into the language of sustainability.  In fact, they do not translate at all, since economists have been unable to recognise the issue of sustainability in the first place – presumably because it would complicate the mathematics of their elegant models.

The theories of global trade and comparative advantage have no meaning unless the full environmental and resource costs of energy and transportation are included in factor and product prices.  Till today, such costs have been ignored, as have the social and human benefits of widespread employment.  To complicate these calculations, barriers to trade in various guises today (under such pretexts as human rights, child labour, low wages, lack of environmental standards) distort international transactions even further.   As far as the economies of the Third World are concerned, we seem to be running headlong up a blind alley.

Technology choices, particularly over the past century, continue to lead us ever closer to the dead end.  The patterns of economic development in the South, copied verbatim from those of the North, depend entirely on the growing use of non-renewable fossil fuels.  As these resources become increasingly scarce and therefore increasingly expensive, a country like India will clearly have a rapidly declining ability to meet the basic needs -- let alone the rising aspirations--of its people.

It would appear obvious that we have now to switch to other, more accessible, more benign and more sustainable forms of energy; energy that, if used wisely and carefully, does not get exhausted: renewable energy.  At the heart of renewable energy lies solar energy.  Other, perhaps, than geo-thermal energy, all renewable energy -- biomass, wind, hydro, wave -- has its origins in the sun.  Taking this broader view of solar energy, the sun is the source of energy that a country like India must focus on.

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