Depriving the poor of energy is bad climate policy

Experts have commended a China-US joint climate statement issued amid the rift between the world’s two largest economies. [Photo/IC] To tackle climate change, rich countries are promising to end fossil fuel use in 29 years. As this becomes excruciatingly costly, the G7 is now thinking about making the world’s poor pay for it. That will go badly. The rich world has seen an incredible development on the back of enormous increases in mostly fossil fuel energy. A couple of hundred years ago, most available power came from backbreaking human work. Even by the end of the 1800s, human labor made…