Still Roaming in the Dark: The Urgent Need for a Global Energy Access Database

During the past year or so, I have been participating in some analytical work done by the World Bank and several other organizations to develop a framework for measuring and improving energy access across the world. By energy access, we refer to a household’s access to enough, safe, and clean energy from basic (lighting, cooking) to productive (agriculture, industry, services) and community (healthcare facilities, schools) needs.

This is how far one can get without being all that controversial (feel free to disagree). Then, it gets complicated. How do we prioritize energy needs? How exactly do we measure access? How do we account for variation in social and cultural preferences? Is energy poverty all that different from conventional income poverty? If so, why?

\There are no clear answers to these questions — and the analytical work I and countless others are doing is very much in progress — but one great place to start is Practical Action’s “Poor People’s Energy Outlook.” It offers a stunning panorama of the difficulties poor people face in their everyday lives with regard to energy. The problem is global, probably of major importance for economic development, and wicked in its complexity.

As a social scientist, I tend to believe that one reason we do not understand the problem very well is the lack of a genuinely global database of the situation on the ground. Various countries have produced datasets on energy, but these are often difficult to compare and rarely available for long time series. One of the things I am going to keep demanding from the rapidly growing energy access community is a global energy access database. Such a dataset would allow policymakers make better decisions on funding and policy priorities. Moreover, a large dataset would allow us to finally begin testing hypotheses about the role of social and cultural factors, as well as national policy, in determining energy access.

Nuclear Fallout and Climate Change: Power Politics and Injustice

Continuing my series of Material I Stole From My Students, I’m going to reflect a bit on Narayan Subramanian’s When the Sky Was Red: America’s Nuclear Legacy in the Marshall Islands, which was recently published in the Columbia Political Review. In the post, Narayan tells the tragic story of the long-term effects of American nuclear tests between 1946-1958 around Marshall Islands, a tiny nation of about 70,000 people. In addition to direct radiation damage, the tests contaminated both food and drinking water. Over time, the island’s inhabitants suffered have also suffered from contamination of fisheries, which are critical to the nation’s economy. Any student of power politics will be unsurprised to learn that the compensation paid by the United States for this damage is woefully insufficient.

Today, Marshall Islands suffers from a different existential threat. As one of the low-lying islands, the country faces a risk of disappearing during this century. A recent dynamic model of sea level rise suggests that even if Marshall Islands and other Pacific islands remain nominally above sea level, storm winds and the resulting waves will inundate large areas and make them largely inhabitable.

These two threats to the Marshall Islands have much in common. In both cases, the governments that are causing them — first the United States alone, and then major emitters collectively — behave irresponsibly because someone else will foot the bill. Although climate change poses a major threat to human well-being everywhere, Pacific islands and other vulnerable countries will suffer more and earlier than the industrialized and rapidly growing countries that are mostly responsible for global warming.

Ethical issues aside, there is little hope for change, at least in the short run. To a much greater extent than any domestic legal code, international law is based on the idea that “sovereign” countries are free to do whatever they want, provided they have the guns and bombs to defend themselves. The system is difficult to change because the most powerful countries value it. I find this state of affairs rather bizarre, given what the consequences of governance by power have been for the vast majority of mankind. But then again, I am not government.

Financing Renewable Energy: Getting the Policy Right

This past week, one of our very talented Columbia graduates, P. Anthony Arias, wrote an interesting blog post on a promising piece of legislation on renewable energy finance in the U.S. Congress. The title of the proposed legislation is the Master Limited Partnerships (MLP) Parity Act, and it is supposed to remove an artificial financial advantage that fossil fuels are currently enjoying.

To summarize Anthony’s post, an MLP is a corporate structure that can be publicly traded. It is not taxed for revenue, its investors are not taxed for revenue, and liability is not limited. Sound good? Yes, until one figures that it is only available to traditional energy forms such: natural gas, oil, and coal.

Policies such as MLPs are one reason why it is extremely dangerous to judge the economic potential of renewables based on past experience. In a sense, renewables are fighting with one hand tied behind the back. Many current energy policies, which were enacted thanks to relentless lobbying by the energy industry, artificially inflate the expected returns from investment to fossil fuels. Given these policies, renewable energy is relatively less attractive as an investment than it would be on a level playing field.

The MLP Parity Act is an example of an economically rational and, just maybe, politically feasible policy. Financial policies that promote investment in societally dangerous forms of energy make no sense whatsoever, except in a political economy model where politicians give rents to greedy special interests in exchange for campaign contributions and other forms of political support.

A Treehugger in Abu Dhabi

No, that’s not the title of my latest novel. Sorry.

This past week, my collaborator and friend Mario Chacon invited me to give a talk at New York University – Abu Dhabi and work together on a project on Brazilian environmental policy. I was really excited because I have never been to the Middle East. The region, of course, plays a major role in energy policy as the main supplier of oil to the world market. So how would it look like? Where did all the billions of oil money go? Since Abu Dhabi holds almost all of the oil in the United Arab Emirates, it is hard to imagine a better destination to answer these questions!

One of the great things about Abu Dhabi is that it really made me think about the importance of the communities we live in for our lives. I am a city/town person myself, and Abu Dhabi is a perfect example of how not to build a town. Here is an amateur diagnosis:

- A great city is made for pedestrians. Without pedestrians, how can one have street culture or interesting coffee shops to visit? Community organizing is pretty much impossible if people drive by you in SUVs. The cultural poverty in Abu Dhabi is shocking, and I’m pretty sure it’s because the city was not build for walking.

- It is also a little disturbing that one of the most carbon-intensive places on the planet then builds a “model sustainable city” — Masdar City — some 40 kilometres away from the center. The right approach would have been to vigorously reduce Abu Dhabi’s carbon intensity and start correcting the mistakes made earlier. Alas, this would have required mobilizing the community and creating a real culture of sustainability. It’s a lot easier to team up with MIT and build a little haven away from everything.

- The architecture consists of one generic high-rise next to another. This is completely outside the scope of my expertise, but I wonder if these could have somehow capitalized on the region’s rich history and culture.

- I am not sure why there is so much fast food in the city, but it is truly gross. The two smells that accompany one everywhere in the center are gasoline and fried chicken. Good thing I wasn’t feeling sick.

So anyway, I realize that Abu Dhabi was not built for people like me. Locals may well enjoy this lifestyle and, its deleterious on the planet notwithstanding, this is all fine. But for anyone interested in sustainable and livable communities, please do check out Abu Dhabi — remember what you saw, and work really hard to achieve the exact opposite.

So, to conclude: if NYUAD is interested in investing its untold billions of oil money in me, the offers need to be very generous. Just as FYI.

Later, I am going to write another post about Abu Dhabi. For fans of the city, fear not: this one will say something more positive!

PS. This weekend, I visited Bath in the United Kingdom — now there’s a town to my taste! I just couldn’t help smiling all day…

Energy Issues in Tanzania: Electricity, Charcoal, Offshore Gas

One of 2013′s highlights so far has been my visit to Tanzania, where I conducted research on solid waste management. During my visit, I also had time to explore energy issues in the country. This post is a little summary of what I learned.

Tanzania currently faces a variety of serious energy problems. To begin with, electricity is simply not available for the vast majority of the population. In 2009, the electrification rate was an appalling 14%, and this statistic hides the fact that power outages are almost daily in the country’s commercial center, Dar es Salaam (no, it is not the capital; Dodoma is). For comparison, India’s electrification rate was at 66% at the same year, and India is widely recognized as having a severe energy poverty problem.

The good news is that the market for distributed electricity generation is growing rapidly. Companies like Sunny Money, who were kind enough to meet with me despite their busy schedule, are planning to sell millions of solar lanterns in rural areas in the coming years. These initiatives could change the lives of millions, and I am really excited about following the development of this business.

Another major issue in Tanzania is charcoal. While charcoal’s environmental impacts in general are subject to a vigorous debate — see here for the Charcoal Project, an exciting Brooklyn-based initiative on the topic — in Tanzania the situation is unambiguous. The demand for charcoal is growing so fast in the urban areas, and Dar in particular, that the country’s forests are being degraded and destroyed at an alarming pace. The government’s open access policy for forests does not help either. At the same time, none of the specialists I met believe banning charcoal is a possible solution. The sector is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, employs hundreds of thousands, and provides for the cooking in the vast majority of urban households. Better forestry laws, effective regulations, and clean technology on the production and consumption side are a much better solution. Here’s hoping I can somehow contribute to this important policy formulation project!

One issue I did not familiarize myself with is natural gas. Recently, many companies have discovered large quantities of natural gas off the coast of Tanzania, as illustrated by Statoil and ExxonMobil’s recent finds. While Tanzania has yet to gain significant revenue from natural gas, the situation will probably change completely within a decade. This means that Tanzania will have to worry about the management of a lucrative natural resource. For Tanzanian government’s nighttime reading, I recommend Paul Collier’s The Plundered Planet. I have not myself done research on the “resource curse,” largely because so many others have, but it is clear that natural gas will dominate many Tanzanian policy debates for years to come.

So what else? One of the most interesting observations about Tanzania is how good the pizza there is. Who would have thought? Perhaps it is because of the use of charcoal in the pizza ovens. Seriously, have some if you find your way there!

Research on Sustainability: Some Challenges

Recently, scientists around the world have become increasingly vocal about the need to use the social sciences to guide sustainability policy at different scales. Perhaps the best example of such an effort is the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change; another major research network is the Earth System Governance project.

These developments are encouraging in that they bring together scholars from different disciplines, including the natural sciences. This is integral to the study of sustainability, and neither publishing incentives nor research networks in traditional disciplines encourage interdisciplinary research. In my own field, political science, publication in an environmental journal is not regarded a good idea for an untenured assistant professor; I suspect I would not get away with it unless I also had publications in traditional political science journals. In economics, the incentive to publish outside economics is probably even weaker.

These incentives have some curious, and ultimately tragic, consequences for the study of sustainability:

• Most of the work on “governance” or “political economy” in interdisciplinary journals would not be recognized as such by mainstream political scientists or political economists;
• While technological advances in remote sensing and other data collection techniques open amazing opportunities, these are badly under-utilized in the study of the politics of sustainability because political scientists and political economists do not interact with the natural science community.

This is clearly a problematic situation, but the incentives for fixing it are not there. Interdisciplinary work does not attract the best political scientists because the leading political science departments mostly do not reward publication outside political science (and perhaps some economics) journals. At the same time, it seems unreasonable to expect that natural scientists would have a good understanding of the state of the art in the study of politics, or that they would invest heavily in studies that will be published in political science journals.

To be sure, there are policy schools with faculty who need not worry about perverse publication incentives in traditional political science and economics departments. However, the methodological training offered in these schools seems to lag behind the training offered in political science and economics departments (I realize that many of my economist friends consider the gap between political science and economics equally wide), and so scholars hailing from policy schools sometimes tend to produce one case study after another. This is not to say that case studies are not valuable, but there is a clear need for more rigorous, explicitly quantitative analysis in the study of sustainability.

OK, I realize this was a bit of a rant. Sometimes this line of research can be frustrating… it would be rather nice if I could just focus on the substance, instead of trying to impress other people in my discipline who are blissfully unaware of the situation in this new “sustainability science” that is now emerging, with growing pains.

Rural Electrification: Integrating Grid and Off-Grid Solutions

I recently returned from a two-week visit to India, where I did research on different approaches to eradicating energy poverty. According to the 2011 India census, every third Indian — approximately 400 million people — still does not have access to electricity. Predominantly a rural problem, a lack of access to electricity deprives households of simple services such as mobile charging, effective nighttime lighting, air circulation, and television. Moreover, communities that lack electricity cannot use it to power livelihood activities, such as small business. In this sense, electrification is a necessary but not sufficient condition for socio-economic development toward modern standards of living.

There are two broad solutions to the electrification problem. Historically, most efforts have focused on “grid electrification,” whereby the government constructs transmission lines to reach additional households. Combined with subsidized electricity pricing, this solution extends the grid to cover poor and remote households.

The other, more recent solution is “off-grid electrification.” This approach is based on decentralized electricity generation, often using renewable energy sources, such as solar photovoltaics or biomass. This solution bypasses the grid, and instead electrifies communities using their own power resources. In Uttar Pradesh, I saw The Energy and Resources Institute‘s off-grid electricity solutions that focused on providing lighting, while in Rajasthan I saw Gram Power‘s “smart grid” systems that allow households to consume pre-paid solar electricity for a wider variety of uses, including fans and televisions.

The suitability of grid and off-grid electrification depends on the context. Grid electrification is often cost-effective and can bring electricity to large numbers of marginal households. However, grid electrification can be highly expensive for remove households that are far removed from the existing grid. This problem is made worse if the grid suffers from large transmission and distribution losses, as is true of India. In such circumstances, off-grid electrification can be a faster and less expensive way to bring electricity services to deprived households.

However, the relationship between grid and off-grid electrification is more complex than this. The profitability of off-grid electrification depends on whether the grid is expected to cover the community in focus in the future. If inexpensive grid electricity will be made available next year, local entrepreneurs have no incentive to invest in decentralized electricity generation. This incentive against off-grid electrification is even larger if electricity is heavily subsidized, as is again the case in India.

Moreover, the equity issue looms large. If grid electricity is much less expensive than off-grid electricity, is it fair that some rural communities are not given access to grid electricity?

In the long run, successful efforts to promote electrification in large, geographically diverse countries probably require an integrated policy framework that allows both grid and off-grid electrification to play a role. Grid electrification is the default approach, and it should be actively encouraged wherever expanding the grid is not too costly. However, grid electrification can only work if the electricity sector is governed by policies that allow efficient electricity generation. Off-grid electrification can be a useful complement to grid electrification in remote communities. Ideally, off-grid electrification efforts are designed in view of an expanding grid so that their profitability does not assume a failure of grid expansion. Similarly, grid electrification should be designed so that it does not crowd out off-grid electrification where the latter is more appropriate.

Are Common But Differentiated Responsibilities to Blame for the Climate Gridlock?

In a recent commentary published in Science, Joseph Aldy and Robert Stavins argue that recent rounds of climate negotiations, and the 2011 Durban negotiations in particular, have improved the chances of a meaningful international climate agreement by undermining the Kyoto Protocol’s distinction between “Annex I” and “non-Annex I” countries, where only the former were expected to commit to emissions reductions. This distinction stems from the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which recognizes the need to differentiate climate mitigation responsibilities by factors such as a country’s level of development.

While most non-Annex I countries are poor developing countries, this group also contains Qatar and Saudi Arabia; moreover, rapidly industrializing countries such as China have increased their emissions over time. Aldy and Stavins note that the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action “calls for a comprehensive legal regime by 2020 that essentially eliminates the Annex I versus non-Annex I distinction.” This would allow meaningful participation by rapidly industrializing countries, which are increasingly important as sources of carbon dioxide emissions.

The commentary points to an important question in international climate policy: how much of the present trouble in the negotiations can be ascribed to earlier institutional choices, such as the Annex distinction, as opposed to fundamental factors, such as underlying distributional conflict?

While the Annex distinction may have played a role at the margin, my view is that the problem is more fundamental than that. Even without the Annex distinction, I would imagine that American conservatives would continue to oppose climate commitments and the domestic public in China and India would reject emissions commitments without genuine leadership by the United States and other wealthy countries. Solving the problem would not be much easier without the Annex distinction because the status quo is politically quite convenient. Chinese and Indian policymakers score points for adopting a tough bargaining position in negotiations; in the United States, China in particular, and India to a lesser extent, are convenient excuses for lack of international commitments or stringent national policies to reduce emissions.

I hope that I am wrong about this, but I would not hold my breath until a meaningful international agreement has been achieved by major emitters.

“Climate Change in the Indian Mind”

Most detailed studies of public opinion about climate change focus on industrialized countries, and the United States in particular. Given this bias, a recent study by the Yale Project on Climate Communication, titled “Climate Change in the Indian Mind“, offers a welcome correction by reporting results from a large survey of over 4,000 Indian recipients. While the study is not intended to be representative of the Indian public due to an oversampling of urban dwellers (75% in the study, 31% in actuality), the results are nonetheless interesting. I highlight here a few on the phenomenon itself:

• According to the study, 54% of the respondents said hot days had become more frequent in their area while only 23% said they had become less frequent;
• At the same time, 41% said they had never heard of global warming or did not know whether they had heard of it;
• When given a brief description of global warming, 72 percent believed it is real.

This evidence is not conclusive, but one possible interpretation is that Indians are already experiencing climate change without necessarily having the information needed to link the environmental changes to the underlying phenomenon. It would be quite interesting to see whether beliefs about local environmental change are associated with the actual temperature record in different areas of India.

Equally interesting are findings on support for climate and energy policy. Even though the Indian domestic audience has a reputation for being hostile to binding international agreements, there seems to be some support for domestic policy:

• 41% of the respondents want the Indian government to do more to address global warming;
• 54% said India should reduce global warming even at an economic cost;
• 51% believed that environmental protection either contributes to economic growth or has no effect on it.

These numbers raise many questions. Are Indians already experiencing clear local climatic changes in their everyday lives? How do Indians learn about global warming, and how could scientific awareness in the country be increased? Are people actually willing to pay for climate policy, or do they only say so? The Yale study offers an excellent point of departure for a research agenda on climate change beliefs in India.

The Cross-State Air Pollution Conundrum

This past week brought some unwelcome, if not surprising, news to those of us who worry about air pollution in the United States. As NYT puts it,

“In a 2-to-1 ruling, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the E.P.A. had exceeded its authority in the way it apportioned the cleanup work among 28 upwind states.”

The court cited two reasons for the Environmental Protection Agency’s exceeding its statutory authority. First, EPA was trying to create an emissions trading system to reduce the cost of mitigation. Second, EPA was trying to speed up implementation by not waiting for states to submit their own plans to reduce air pollution. According to two of the three judges, these features of the regulation contradict the Clean Air Act.

The decision underscores the poisonous effects of political paralysis for environmental policy. It is hard to imagine why anyone, except for the most radical critics of capitalism, who are in short supply in America, would oppose emissions trading to reduce the cost of pollution abatement. This is clearly in everyone’s interest. However, the Clean Air Act was not designed to allow for this possibility. Emissions trading requires legislation in the Congress, and this seems impossible given how hostile the Republicans are to any efforts to protect the environment.

Similarly, the emphasis on state rights to implement their own plans seems questionable in this case. The whole idea of the regulation was to protect fundamental state rights to clean air by forcing upwind polluters to clean up their act. From an economic perspective, emissions trading is also clearly superior to a collection of uncoordinated state action plans. Any state plan that is to significantly reduce air pollution must produce emissions reductions, so state action plans would amount to the same thing — except without the mutually profitable cost reduction from emissions trading.

This case says much about American environmental policy today. The federal government’s ability to protect Americans from deadly pollution depends on existing legislation. This legislation is robust to political challenges, and this has allowed federal governments to move forward even during difficult times. However, the system is far from optimal, and in the current political climate there is little hope for correction.

And so I end this post with yet another jab targeted at politicians. What can I say? Political science is a depressing profession.