In Praise of Petroleum?

- struggled with defining “sustainability. ” Typical of efforts to make concrete this slippery concept was a preparatory paper addressing one of the most pressing issues in human development, how to bring modern energy services to the one-third of humanity whose development and survival requirements suffer from lack of them (2). These twobillion people have little access to electricity and depend for cooking and heating on local biomass in the form of wood, crop residues, and dung. In common with other such analyses, the premise of this paper was that, for the poor as for everyone else, only renewable energy sources qualify as sustainable. After all, fossil fuels are in principle limited, and the fossil carbon they contain is a threat when released. Nevertheless, there are questionable assumptions behind the premise that fossil fuels are unsustainable for the rural poor:--That the major alternative, local use of biomass fuel, is, by comparison, sustainable. In many cases, however, it contributes to local depletion of biomass resources including forests, produces serious health impacts in the local population because of its high emissions of pollutants, and even when renewably harvested is not greenhouse neutral because the poor combustion in simple stoves