Millions still without power as world pursues clean energy

Electricity is a recent arrival at Belém where the world met to discuss climate change

- MAX BEARAK

ON ONE SIDE of the bay, cruise ships towered above the trees, serving as temporary hotels for thousands of people who attended the UN climate talks nearby.

Ship lights twinkled as diplomats wrestled with how to provide an electricity-gobbling world with cleaner sources of power. But just across the bay is an utterly different world, one where electricity arrived only this year for some. Many more are still waiting for it. This is a reality for hundreds of millions of people worldwide who still lack access to power, one of modernity’s most essential innovations.

“They’re marvelous, aren’t they?” said Joelma Moraes Anjo, a lifelong resident of Paqueta Island, who was admiring the gleaming ships from her home, where reliable electricity was installed about nine months ago. “It’s almost like we’re part of COP,” she said, using the abbreviation for the UN talks being held just a few miles away in Belém, a sprawling city on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. The vast majority of people without electricity live in Africa, but the numbers in the Western Hemisphere are not small either. Some 17 million go entirely without and 60 million more rely on diesel, one of the dirtiest and most expensive forms of fuel, to run small generators. In Brazil’s Amazon, one million people have no access and two million more use diesel.

Across South America and the Caribbean, nearly all of those people are Indigenous, Afro-descendant or, like on Paqueta and Jutuba islands, part of ethnically mixed communities that live along the banks of the Amazon and its myriad tributaries. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions that accelerate climate change, their contribution is infinitesimal.