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Reducing poverty can actually lower energy demand, finds research:
[...] We found that households that do have access to clean fuels, safe water, basic education and adequate food—that is, those not in extreme poverty—can use as little as half the energy of the national average in their country.
This is important, as it goes directly against the argument that more resources and energy will be needed for people in the global south to escape extreme poverty. The biggest factor is the switch from traditional cooking fuels, like firewood or charcoal, to more efficient (and less polluting) electricity and gas.
In Zambia, Nepal and Vietnam, modern energy resources are extremely unfairly distributed—more so than income, general spending, or even spending on leisure. As a consequence, poorer households use more dirty energy than richer households, with ensuing health and gender impacts. Cooking with inefficient fuels consumes a lot of energy, and even more when water needs to be boiled before drinking.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 07 2021, @03:50PM
One of the problems with a flat minimum wage, be that $15/hour or some other amount, is it doesn't account for the massive differences in the cost of living throughout the US. It's something like homes being 20x more expensive in the highest cost areas as compared to the lowest cost.
The very name, "poverty", suggests the problem is simply a lack of money. If that were so, throwing money at the poor would solve the problem. Been tried, and while it does help, it doesn't end poverty. In the US, there's a lot of predatory finance-- the loan sharks, pay day lenders, pawn shops, that kind of crap. I knew they were bad, I didn't know how bad they were. Credit cards with 29% annual interest rates were the worst I knew of, until I learned how stunningly high the rates were for those others. Try 240%. Even 300%. Usually, those rates are capped by law. If it is "only" 240%, it's because that's the maximum allowed by state law. You'd think that anyone who goes for such terrible loans must be stupid, but it's a lot more complicated than that. The person who takes that kind of loan isn't walking into the loan shark's business with no history, no, they're crawling in, knowing they're going to be screwed, hard, because they are already beat way down and can't get anything better in the limited time they have. But don't think banks are above screwing their customers, with those high penalty fees for every little slip. One way they get beat down is they got hurt on the job, can't work that job any more because of the injury, their employer is screwing them out of workers comp, and now they can't pay the rent. They also have a massive bill from the emergency room, which, because the hospital can't charge interest, they have not paid. The medical providers' bills are highly, highly inflated, full of complicated bull, price gouging, and mistakes in their favor, but somehow the medics get away with it. Then they get dragged into court over the medical bills.
It would help the poor a lot more just to give them financial justice. 300% interest, when inflation has been below 5% for decades, is nuts. Medical pricing and billing is an outrage. Not even the rich escape from medical price gouging. Finance in the US is a minefield. It's unfair. Those two areas are merely the worst. There's dozens of minor screw jobs, such as the high cost of Internet service, traffic enforcement scams such as the speed trap and the red light camera, the private tax prep industry doing all they can, legal or not, to push people into paying them, bad deals on "protection" against fraudulent charges on your debit card (if you have one) for just $6/month when such protection is already required by law at no additional charge, groceries being less accessible and more expensive in poor neighborhoods, the legal system's reputation for being both expensive and highly biased in favor of the wealthy, and so on. The unfairness of it all is corrosive and damaging to civil society.