Hundreds of Millions Still Cook Over Wood, and That Is a Moral Question

Somewhere tonight a woman is crouched over a fire of wood, dung or charcoal in a one-room home, cooking dinner for her children and breathing the smoke. She did not choose that fire. She has no gas line, no reliable grid, and no cash for a cylinder. And a conference of very serious people in a very comfortable city is, at this moment, debating how quickly her country should be discouraged from ever building the power plant that would end her smoke.

That is the moral question. It is not an abstraction, and it is not a quarrel about thermometers. It is a question about whom our policies are for.

Define the terms. Energy poverty means lacking access to modern, reliable energy: electricity for light, refrigeration, pumps and machines, and clean fuel for cooking and heat. Clean cooking means a fuel and stove that does not fill the home with smoke. The claim of this post, stated plainly: cheap, reliable energy is the surest road out of poverty that human beings have ever found, so a policy that makes it harder for poor nations to build gas, coal and other dependable power carries a moral cost, and the rich world's climate politics rarely puts that cost on the ledger.

The smoke in the kitchen

Begin with the facts that nobody disputes. The World Health Organization has for years tracked the effects of household air pollution, the smoke produced when families cook and heat with wood, crop waste, dung, charcoal or coal on open fires and simple stoves. WHO's estimates put the number of people still relying on such fuels at more than two billion, which is roughly a quarter of humanity. WHO also attributes millions of premature deaths a year to the health effects of that smoke, with a figure of around three million in its recent estimates. I leave you to check the current year's figure at the WHO website, because it changes, but the order of magnitude has been the same for a long time.

The burden is not spread evenly. The people who cook over open fires are mostly women and young children, who spend the most time near the stove. The smoke contributes to lung disease, to pneumonia in children, and to a range of other illnesses. The labor of gathering fuel eats hours a day that could go to school, to work or to rest. And in many places, the wood is taken from forests that are shrinking, which is an environmental cost as well as a human one.

Alongside the cooking problem sits the electricity problem. Several hundred million people in the world, by the International Energy Agency's accounting, have no electricity at all, and many hundreds of millions more have supply so unreliable that a hospital cannot count on a refrigerator for its vaccines. A clinic that loses power in the middle of an operation is not a statistic. It is a tragedy with a particular name on it.

None of this is mysterious. We know how it ends. Every country that is now rich once burned wood and dung, and every one of them left that stage the same way: by building cheap, abundant, reliable power.

The road out: what South Korea and China did

Here is the evidence, in numbered premises.

1. Energy use and income move together. Across countries and across decades, higher electricity use per person goes with higher income per person. Correlation is not causation, and the arrow runs both ways, since richer people buy more appliances. But the machinery of a modern economy, from factories to hospitals to cold storage for food, runs on power, and no country has industrialized without it.
2. South Korea is the cleanest example. At the end of the Korean War in 1953, South Korea was among the poorest places on earth. Over the following decades it built an industrial economy, and it did so while building out an electric system to power it. By any measure, its people are now enormously richer, healthier and longer-lived than their grandparents. It did not get there by waiting for the cleanest possible technology. It got there by making power plentiful and building the economy on top of it.
3. China tells the same story at a larger scale. Beginning with the market reforms of the late 1970s, China built power plants at a furious pace, much of it coal, and its economy grew at rates the world had rarely seen. According to the World Bank, the number of Chinese living in extreme poverty fell by something on the order of eight hundred million people over about four decades. Whatever one thinks of the Chinese government, and a conservative has plenty to say about it, those people went from the dirt floor to the apartment block, and the power plants were part of how.
4. The pattern repeats. Britain did it with coal, America with coal, oil and then gas, Japan, Taiwan and others with a mix. There is no example of a poor country that became rich on a plan to build as little energy as possible.

The inference is not that coal is wonderful. It is that for a family at the bottom of the ladder, the choice is not between coal and a clean future. It is between a reliable power source today and the open fire.

The financing squeeze

Now the part that should trouble every honest person: what the rich world has done about it.

Beginning in the 2010s, major lenders and governments began to restrict their financing of fossil fuel projects abroad. In 2013 the World Bank announced that it would finance coal-fired power only in rare circumstances where no feasible alternative existed. Other development banks and export agencies followed with their own limits. In 2021 a wave of governments and institutions pledged to stop public financing of overseas fossil fuel projects, with limited exceptions, and some European institutions adopted stricter rules still. I would point you to each institution's published policy for exact terms, because the policies differ and have been revised more than once.

Consider what that means in practice. A developing country with large deposits of natural gas, or an urgent need for baseload power, goes to the international lender to finance a plant. The lender says no to coal, or steers the country toward wind and solar, and attaches conditions to gas. Wind and solar are real and useful, and many poor countries are building them. But they do not run when the wind is still or the sun is down, and a grid that depends on them needs backup or storage that a poor country can least afford. So the country either goes without, or it turns to whoever will lend on other terms. In many cases that is Chinese state banks, which financed a great deal of coal power abroad until China pledged in 2021 to stop building new coal plants overseas. The rich world has not so much reduced the world's coal as it has stepped back from deciding how it is financed and who owns the plant.

I should add what this does not claim. Developing countries are free to choose their own energy mix, and some will choose renewables for good reasons. The complaint is not that anyone builds solar. It is that wealthy governments and banks, having built their own prosperity on abundant fossil energy, have used their control of credit to tell the poor to skip the step.

There is a worked example in the simple arithmetic of cooking. Switching a household from open fires to liquefied petroleum gas, a fossil fuel, takes the smoke out of the kitchen. It is a clean cooking fuel by the standard that WHO uses to judge health effects. A policy campaign that treats every fossil fuel as the enemy, without distinguishing a gas cylinder from a coal plant, would deprive a family of the very thing that saves its lungs. That is an obvious place where the slogan and the human need part company.

The strongest objection

The best case against this argument deserves to be heard in full.

The best case: The poorest people on earth are also the most exposed to the effects of a warming climate. They live in places prone to drought and flood, they farm for a living, and they have the least money to adapt. Rich countries caused most of the historical emissions, so it is unfair to ask poor ones to repeat the same path and bring the damage down on themselves. Renewable energy has become cheap enough that poor countries can leapfrog fossil fuels, as phones skipped landlines. And aid for clean energy is a way of making up for the harm already done.

Now the answer, point by point.

1. The premise that the poor are most exposed is true, and it is an argument for making them richer. The difference in death tolls between a storm in a rich country and a storm in a poor one comes almost entirely from wealth. Houses, roads, hospitals, warning systems and insurance are what separate a disaster from a catastrophe. The Dutch did not survive the North Sea by being poor, as the story of After the 1953 Flood the Dutch Built Their Way to Safety, a Lesson in Adaptation shows. The most protective thing a poor family can have, against heat, flood or drought, is income.
2. "Rich countries caused it" is not a reason to deny the poor the same ladder. Fairness runs the other way. If a family in Nairobi wants a refrigerator and a family in Ohio has two, the moral burden is on the one with two to explain why the first should wait. A person's claim to light and warmth does not expire because of what someone else's grandfather did.
3. Leapfrogging is real in some places and a slogan in others. Mobile phones skipped landlines because a phone is cheap to build. A national grid is not a phone. Industry needs power that runs at three in the morning in August, and a country cannot run a steel mill on a promise. Renewables are growing in the developing world and should be free to grow. They should not be the only thing allowed.
4. Aid is welcome, and it has a poor record when it replaces growth. Decades of development experience point the same way as South Korea: what lasts is an economy that can pay for its own power, not a dependency on grants that follow the moods of donor capitals.
5. The numbers cut against the objection. Global emissions are driven by the largest economies. The emissions that would come from lifting hundreds of millions of people to a modest level of electricity use are small beside the large totals, while the human gain is enormous. A moral accounting that gives the same weight to a ton of carbon from a heated swimming pool and a ton from a cooking stove is not much of an accounting. I have argued in Grant the Warming, Then Ask What Each Climate Policy Actually Buys that the right test is what a policy buys, and this is where the test bites hardest.

What the Founders would recognize

You may wonder what the Founders have to do with an African village. More than you would think. The Declaration of Independence names "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" as unalienable rights, and it says they belong to all men, not to Americans alone. Americans have always believed that those rights are universal, and that a good society is one that protects them.

The moral tradition behind that, Jewish and Christian, teaches that every person bears the image of God, and that the strong have a duty to the weak. It does not say that the duty is met by lecturing a woman about her fuel. It says to feed the hungry and to heal the sick, and a refrigerator in a clinic does both. A conservative, who believes in the dignity of the individual and in the family as the basic unit of society, has every reason to care that a mother can cook without poisoning her children.

There is a lesson here for the way we talk about energy at home as well. We have a habit of treating cheap power as a vice and of regarding any family's wish for a warm house and a cold refrigerator as a failing to be managed. The coverage of climate tends to assume that the only people with a stake in energy are the ones who attend the summit. A person who has never had to choose between heating a room and buying food finds the question a lot easier. That is a point about Straws, Bags and the Other Small Sacrifices That Only Make Us Feel Green, which asks the comfortable to feel virtuous at no cost to themselves, while the cost of real energy policy falls on someone else.

And it is a point about oil and gas themselves. A barrel of crude does more than fuel cars. It is the raw material for fertilizer, plastics, medicines and the asphalt on the road to the clinic, as Lipstick, Aspirin and Asphalt, Everything a Barrel of Crude Oil Becomes lays out. A world that treats those industries as an embarrassment has forgotten what they built.

What a decent policy looks like

A conservative answer need not be complicated.

• Let poor countries choose. International lenders and rich-world governments should stop setting a one-size-fits-all rule against financing gas and other dependable power in developing countries, and should judge projects on their merits, including cost, reliability and the owner's ability to repay.
• Back clean cooking now. Expanding access to gas cylinders and other clean fuels is among the cheapest ways to save lives, and nothing in it requires waiting for a perfect grid.
• Export what works. American natural gas, shipped as liquefied gas, displaces coal and lowers emissions in the places that buy it, as How America Went From Importing Natural Gas to Shipping It Worldwide describes. Selling dependable energy to the world is good for American workers and for the people who receive it.
• Defend the ladder. The institutions that made the West rich, property rights, courts, contracts and open trade, are what make a poor country rich too. A foreign aid program that hands a village one solar panel and a press release is kinder to the donor than to the village; the panel charges a phone, and the press release charges nothing.

The case in brief

1. More than two billion people still cook with wood, dung, charcoal or coal, and WHO attributes millions of premature deaths a year to the smoke. Several hundred million have no electricity at all.
2. Every wealthy country, including South Korea, and China since its reforms, climbed out of poverty on cheap, reliable power, and no poor country has done it on as little energy as possible.
3. Development lenders and rich governments have restricted financing for coal and other fossil power abroad, beginning with the World Bank's 2013 coal policy, which can push poor countries toward weaker options or to lenders with their own agenda.
4. The strongest objection, that the poorest suffer most from warming, is an argument for making them richer, since wealth is the best protection against weather.
5. A decent policy lets poor countries choose, backs clean cooking and exports reliable energy, and does not tell the poor to skip the step the rich took.

What you can do: ask your member of Congress how the United States votes at the multilateral development banks on energy lending, and ask that cheap, reliable power for poor countries be treated as a goal of American foreign policy.