Biomass fuel burning causes health problems

Cost of generating renewable energy is declining

Manipal: Chairman of Karnataka State Pollution Control Board H.C. Sharatchandra said on Friday that unequal energy consumption was one of the glaring features of disparity between the rich and the poor nations.

He was speaking after inaugurating a workshop on “Recent advances in energy and environmental management systems,” organised by the Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) here.

Dr. Sharatchandra said the world’s richest countries, with only a fifth of the world’s population, account for 60 per cent of commercial energy. For instance, one person in the United States consumed as much fuel as 250 persons might consume in a poor country, while two billion people or one in every three human beings had no access to modern energy. They relied on traditional energy sources such as wood, charcoal, crop waste and dung. The overwhelming majority of these live in developing countries, he said.

Apart from their toll on environment through deforestation, burning biomass fuel such as wood filled the homes of the poor with toxic smoke, posing major health problems. Over two million people died every year from breathing a cocktail of toxic chemicals let off by biomass fuels. Indoor air pollution was one of the world’s top ten causes of premature death. A lot of time that could be devoted to other productive activities was wasted foraging for fuel-wood. All this held back development efforts both at the household and at the national levels, Dr. Sharatchandra said.

This tendency reinforced gender inequalities, as women were disproportionately affected. Energy related issues could lead to governance problems within States and affect relations between them.

The high cost of oil imposed economic burden on developing countries such as India. The challenge of energy for a developing country was about availability, access, efficiency, quality and sustainability. The primary question was how to develop clean, efficient, affordable, sufficient and sustainable energy to reach the development goals, he said.

It was necessary to give importance to renewable energy. The cost of generating energy from renewable sources was declining. But the renewable energy provided only four per cent of world’s commercial energy, with half of it contributed by hydro power, he said.