“Energy Poverty”

Show me a place filled with “energy wealth” and I’ll show you a people who wish they were anywhere else.

Globally, per-capita income rises with national energy use, meaning that cheap energy is critical to reducing poverty. “It’s hard to be productive if you don’t have lights to read by,” Bill Gates writes in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

Connecting rising incomes with the reduction of poverty means that one has successfully impoverished a community’s sk…