Can renewable energy sources be ethically scaled up?

As Senegal’s former energy minister and the International Energy Agency’s executive director said in 2020, “Access to reliable and affordable energy has been a privilege for the few (in the world) when it should be a basic right for all.”

And now, even if we don’t intend to, we are risking taking this human right away from the people who have it, and actively working to restrict those who don’t have it from gaining it. Many of the serious effects of climate change on the world cannot be stopped by the United States alone simply shifting its energy mix to a larger proportion of solar and wind energy. Is our best chance at building global climate resilience and mitigation through expanding the right to affordable and reliable energy as rapidly as possible around the globe even at the expense of allowing global greenhouse gas emissions to rise?

The human livability of our climate depends on how well we can master climate conditions. Fossil fuel use has allowed humans to take a dangerous climate and make it more livable. Fossil fuels have protected many from things like extreme temperatures, storms, floods, and droughts through their role in powering irrigation systems, modern buildings and central heating.

Equitable access, in the United States and the world, to affordable and reliable energy is essential to the provision of public health services and medical care, shelter and food on the massive scale these human rights are needed to be scaled to. It is and should be recognized as a human right that should be preserved where it is currently being fulfilled and expanded in places where it is not regardless of wealth, race, religious views, geography, as well as along other axes of potential discrimination.

Any talk about the role of electric vehicles and solar/wind energy in protecting and extending the human right to affordable and reliable energy to all must include how establishing “a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations,” as promoted by President Joe Biden in his State of the Union speech, will unwittingly support the worst humanitarian abuses in the world while many of the solar panels we import to the United States will be made, at least in part, with slave labor from China. Pursuing this path violates at least both Article 1 and Article 4 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

We cannot go down the path of so blatantly violating basic environmental justice principles without addressing harsh realities and it’s unfair to the masses in the world whose lives will be devalued, and will suffer and die while a relative few find comfort in a false sense of morality by driving around in EVs and deriving their electricity from solar/wind energy.