Several years ago, the word “green” became a noun, and not something you ate with other vegetables and your favorite dressing.

Adding the adjective “green” to anything — “green” energy, “green” cleaning products, etc. — automatically makes it more expensive. This isn’t a problem for the “rich,” but it is a problem for everyone else, particularly the poor, who obviously have less money to spend.

The National Center for Policy Analysis chronicles how much “green” costs the poor in one specific area, energy:

The United Nations and other global warming activists frequently say that global warming hurts the poor the most. But the policies that these groups want to put into place to combat climate change are incredibly costly and they hurt the poor most of all, says Bjorn Lømborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre.

• Since 2005, British households have reduced electricity consumption by 10 percent.
• This is a stat frequently cheered by environmentalists, but they tend to leave out the fact that the reduction came alongside a 50 percent increase in electricity prices (necessary to pay for Britain’s increased share of renewables from 1.8 percent to 4.6 percent).

This directly impacts the poor, for whom electricity costs are a large portion of their budgets. Higher energy prices means that the poor must reduce their electricity consumption in order to pay for it. Energy consumption among the rich, on the other hand, has remained steady.

In the last five years, it has become 63 percent more expensive to heat a home in the United Kingdom. At the same time, real wages have declined.

• More and more households (17 percent) are being forced to spend more than 10 percent of their income simply on energy, earning the designation “energy poor.” Elderly households are especially affected by this — 25 percent of all households whose inhabitants are over the age of 60 fall into this category.
• The situation in Germany is even worse. German households have seen an 80 percent increase in electricity prices since 2000, and nearly 7 million households are considered “energy poor.”

In the developing world, millions are dying from indoor air pollution, because they must burn twigs and dung to heat their homes. These poverty-stricken nations need access to cheap electricity, yet the developed world wants these nations to use solar panels.

• According to the Centre for Global Development, a $10 billion renewable energy investment would lift 20 million Africans out of poverty.
• But a $10 billion investment in gas electrification? That would lift 90 million out of poverty.

People and nations become prosperous with access to affordable and dependable energy. Those advocating policies to combat global warming claim that doing so will help the world’s poor. They do not recognize the fact that cutting carbon emissions is the least efficient means to this end. What the poor need is affordable and plentiful energy.

Lømborg adds specific examples:

Stories of fuel poverty frequently appear in the press. A 75-year-old widow, Rita Young, has been quoted saying: ‘I’ve worked all my life. It doesn’t feel fair. People my age don’t want to put hats and scarves on in their homes, but there’s nothing we can do about it. I sit in a blanket, put on a hat and sometimes go to bed at 7.30 in the evening.’ She joins almost a million other pensioners who are forced to stay in bed longer to keep warm because of rising fuel bills.

But things could be worse. In Germany green subsidies will cost €23.6 billion this year. Real household electricity prices have increased by 80 per cent since 2000, contributing to almost seven million households now living in energy poverty. Wealthy homeowners in Bavaria might feel good about installing inefficient solar panels on their roofs, but their lavish subsidies are essentially financed by poor tenants in the Ruhr paying higher electricity costs. …

The rich world generates just 0.8 per cent of its energy from solar and wind, far from meeting even minimal demand. In fact, Germany will build ten new coal-fired power plants over the next two years to keep its own lights on.

Africa is the renewable utopia, getting 50 per cent of its energy from renewables — though nobody wants to emulate it. In 1971, China derived 40 per cent of its energy from renewables. Since then, it has powered its incredible growth almost exclusively on heavily polluting coal, lifting a historic 680 million people out of poverty. Today, China gets a trifling 0.23 per cent of its energy from unreliable wind and solar.

Yet most Westerners still want to focus on putting up more inefficient solar panels in the developing world. But this infatuation inflicts a real cost. A recent analysis from the Centre for Global Development shows that $10 billion invested in such renewables would help lift 20 million people in Africa out of poverty. It sounds impressive, until you learn that if this sum was spent on gas electrification it would lift 90 million people out of poverty. So in choosing to spend that $10 billion on renewables, we deliberately end up choosing to leave more than 70 million people in darkness and poverty. …

Dr Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend about how the industrialised economies’ greenhouse emissions have wrecked the world. He urges us to cut fossil fuel-based pollution, to help the world’s poor. Sadly, it does not seem to occur to the well-meaning Dr Williams to ask whether we best help the poor by cutting carbon emissions — or by focusing on the provision of affordable food, medicine or energy. It seems not to occur to him that there is a trade-off.