The problem facing the world community is how to meet those needs while reining in the global greenhouse gases warming the earth.
Advances and losses
Progress has been made. Since world leaders met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the first Earth Summit on Sustainable Development 20 years ago, global poverty has fallen by half, per capita income has doubled and life expectancy has increased by four years. Yet those advances have come at a very high cost to the global environment, says Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute. Weve had 3.3 million deaths every year over the last 20 years from pollution. Weve been losing forests, 13 million hectares every year. Thats the size of England every single year. Weve had a 50 percent increase in carbon dioxide and were now heading towards a world in which average temperatures will be four degrees Celsius above what they were historically.
Currently 1.3 billion people lack electricity, even as a burgeoning middle class - expected to grow from 2 billion to 5 billion people by 2050 - is demanding more electric power. Steers says 1,200 coal-fired power plants have been proposed globally in 59 countries, largely in China and India, two of the worlds biggest sources of carbon emissions. He notes renewable energy investment fell in 2012 for the first time in eight years.
But Steers is encouraged by government policies which could help reverse that trend. Over 100 countries now have renewable energy targets. And so what were looking out for this year is whether some of those new policies have bite and whether we are going to cross a threshold so that renewable energy is recognized as a truly economically viable solution.
Renewal bubble
