An energy system is not only a set of machines. It decides who gets light and who breathes smoke, which countries hold power over others, and whose jobs disappear or appear.

Energy poverty

Recent estimates suggest that about 670 million people still live without electricity, and more than four in five of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. A lack of power means clinics that cannot keep vaccines cold, schools without lights or computers, and small businesses that cannot run machines.

Cooking is an even larger problem. Around two billion people still cook mainly with wood, charcoal, dung or kerosene, often indoors. Smoke from household cooking fires is linked to about three million deaths a year, mostly among women and young children, who spend the most time near the fire. Gathering fuel takes hours each week, a burden that falls mostly on women and girls. Clean cooking, whether with gas, electricity or improved stoves, may be among the most valuable health measures in the world.

Skipping the wires

Mobile phones let many countries skip landlines. Something similar is happening with power. Off-grid solar kits and village mini-grids can bring electricity to places far from any power line, often faster and more cheaply than extending the grid. Companies such as M-KOPA, founded in Kenya in 2011, sell solar kits that customers pay off in small amounts by mobile money. Critics warn against setting the bar too low: a few lights and a phone charger change lives, but running a workshop, a water pump or a hospital needs much more power. Many argue that access should mean enough energy for people to earn a living, not just to light a room.

Critical minerals

Clean energy needs materials: lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite for batteries, copper for wires and motors, rare earth elements for many magnets in turbines and electric motors. An electric car uses several times the minerals of a gasoline car. Yet there is a crucial difference. Minerals are bought once and can be recycled, while fuel is burned and must be bought again and again.

Supply is highly concentrated. The Democratic Republic of the Congo mines about seven tenths of the world's cobalt, some of it from small hand-dug mines where investigators have documented child labor and deadly accidents. China refines most of the world's lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare earths, and since 2023 it has restricted exports of several minerals. Mining also brings water use, pollution and conflict over land, including in Chile's Atacama Desert, where Indigenous communities question lithium extraction. Responses include new mines elsewhere, recycling, and battery chemistries that avoid cobalt and nickel entirely.

A new geopolitics

In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian gas supplies to Europe were cut sharply, and gas and power prices soared. Europe responded with imported liquefied gas, conservation and faster building of renewables. The new politics will look different. An oil cutoff hits the fuel a country needs every day, while a mineral cutoff mainly slows the building of new equipment, since existing panels and batteries keep working. Countries that depend on selling oil and gas face the opposite risk: falling demand could shrink the revenue their governments rely on.

A just transition

Closing coal mines and plants can devastate towns built around them. The idea of a just transition holds that workers and communities who bear the costs of change deserve support, retraining and new investment. A wider fairness question divides countries. Rich nations emitted most of the carbon already in the atmosphere. Some leaders of poorer countries argue they should be free to use gas, as rich countries once used coal, to grow their economies. Others reply that cheap solar and wind let poorer countries skip the dirty stage altogether.

Weighing the trade-offs

Every energy source carries costs: money, reliability, carbon, local pollution, land, safety, security and jobs. No source wins on every measure, which is why most serious plans mix several. A Universal Humanist approach adds a test of its own: the people who bear the costs, from cobalt miners to coal towns to families breathing cooking smoke, should count as ends in themselves and have a voice in the choice.

Worked example: South Africa's coal dilemma

Coal supplies around four fifths of South Africa's electricity, from aging plants run by the state utility Eskom. As those plants broke down, the country suffered rolling blackouts, called load shedding, on most days of 2023. Coal mining supports tens of thousands of jobs in the province of Mpumalanga, which also has some of the worst air pollution in the country. In 2021 several rich countries pledged an initial 8.5 billion dollars to help South Africa move away from coal. Meanwhile, households and businesses tired of blackouts installed rooftop solar at record rates.

Apply the ideas. Reliability, health, jobs, climate and debt all pull in different directions. Keeping old coal plants running protects jobs but not lungs or power supplies. Building renewables quickly helps reliability and climate but requires grid lines, money and plans for coal workers. The case shows that the transition is finally about how a society shares costs and benefits, a question for citizens as much as engineers.