Don't Overlook the Outlets

 

                    Hello, my name is Amy Rainy Willis. Today I am going to be expressing my opinion on an ongoing energy production issue. Having "electricity access" in the words of the IEA is a household that is able to afford 4 lightbulb working for 5 hours a day 1 refrigerator a fan operating 6 hours per day, a mobile phone charger, and a TV operating for 4 hours a day. When all of this is added up in a year this "average family" uses 1,250 kWh per household including standard appliances. So in other words, if you use 1,250 kWh annually or more you are considered having "access" to electricity. 

                    Right now an average American household has 4-5 people in it. This means that electricity access is "gained" when one person uses 280 kWh per year. Unfortunately, this interpretation is quite insufficient. For instance, World Bank data puts the average electricity use per person at nearly 13,000 kWh per year. So in other words we have a global definition of "gaining" access to electricity when a person uses just 2% (1/50th) of the electricity that Americans use. 

                    Let's put this into a real-world perspective. Mr. and Mrs. Doe "have electricity" if you have electricity for one week out of the year 7 days (2% of 365 days). In other words, it would be like not having electricity for 358 out of 365 days of the year but you would still be classified as "having electricity". 

                    So many people have this issue with the 1.2 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa being the most impacted followed closely by the 1.4 billion in India. These people aren't lecturing about climate and eliminating fossil fuel use from Yale, Penn State, and Stanford instead they spend their time collecting fuel and saying and carrying out tasks to survive that we had no need for anymore over a century ago. Women and children in South Africa combined to walk a daily distance equivalent to 16 trips to the moon and back! That is just the trips to get water. 

                    Energy poverty is the main thing stopping economic growth currently: Approximately 3 billion humans rely on things like wood, dung, and charcoal for cooking and heating. Most of this sadly has been ignored much too often by rich Westerners that have all the energy that they need to live comfortably meanwhile people are fighting to survive in other less fortunate countries. 

                    "The energy virtue signaling and clear hypocrisy of the privileged west must be continually exposed. Human development literally depends on it."