Make No Small Plans: Turning On The Lights For 1.4 Billion People [View all]

[kristopher]

Make No Small Plans: Turning On The Lights For 1.4 Billion People


At the recent Fortune Brainstorm Green conference which I attended in Laguna Niguel, California,...

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But, for me, it was an international theme that really grabbed my attention. While the U.S. is currently mired in pre-election clean-tech bashing and partisan shenanigans, it was a simple, straightforward, high-impact presentation by Michael Elliott, president and CEO of the poverty-alleviation-focused nonprofit ONE (One.org), that turned my head. In a packed room, he asked us to imagine living after dark in one of the many places in the developing world without access to electricity (the daily reality for about 1.4 billion people globally). Then, he literally turned off the lights. No video, no music, nothing…and then he kept talking, and said this is what it would be like living in the tens of thousands of villages, favelas, and other outposts that have no, or limited, electricity.

“So just think for a second,” Elliott said in the blackened hotel conference room, “what you, with all your dreams, your brainpower, those synapses firing off, how your life would have been different if you had to cope with the fact that around six or seven [every] evening your life went dark. And I’ll tell you what, it wouldn’t have been easy.”

With the lights back on, he then outlined a program, spearheaded by the United Nations and supported by business, foundations, governments, and nonprofits like his, that could help to change the equation. The goals of the program, named Sustainable Energy for All, are both simple and aggressive. By 2030:

- Ensure universal access to modern energy services. (95 percent of the people without access to modern energy live in sub-Saharan Africa or developing Asia.)
-Double the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency. (Investing in energy efficiency is a low-cost method of creating jobs, fostering economic growth, and improving energy security, especially for countries that lack domestic fossil-fuel resources.)
-Double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix. (Increase energy from renewable resources—wind, water, the sun, biomass and geothermal — from 15 percent of the global energy mix to 30 percent.

...

As I think about it more, perhaps the goals aren’t so audacious after all. The mission set forth, while grand, seems achievable. And the call to action is at once both motivational and grounded. We face significant ecological, economic, and social challenges of historic proportions on a global scale, and need to have realistic “stretch” goals. I think Sustainable Energy for All might just be the mantra/meme many of us are looking for.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/02/474340/make-no-small-plans-turning-on-the-lights-for-14-billion-people/