Pobreza Energética en México: ¿Por dónde empezamos?

In recent years, the strong correlation between energy consumption and improvements in the quality of life of households and society as a whole has become increasingly evident. Today, children require computers, tablets, and internet access in order to receive an education that is both adequate and consistent with the standards of the modern world.

In this context, it is becoming increasingly common to hear about the importance of energy and the hardships faced by households and communities when they lack access to it, or when, despite having access, it is not affordable and optimal consumption creates additional challenges. So, where do we begin? Perhaps by first understanding what poverty is, how it is measured in Mexico, and what insights emerge when we combine these two elements.

Mexico was a pioneer in introducing the concept of multidimensional poverty in Latin America through the creation of the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) in 2006 and the implementation of the National Household Income and Expenditure Survey in 2008. Prior to that, poverty in Mexico was reported from a one-dimensional perspective that considered only the income of Mexican households and families.

At that time, three poverty lines were established to classify poverty nationwide: food poverty, capability poverty, and asset poverty. The first assessed whether income was sufficient to provide adequate nutrition; the second, whether it was sufficient to cover food needs as well as health and education requirements; and the third, whether it could also cover expenses related to clothing, housing, and transportation. When income was insufficient, households were considered to experience food, capability, or asset deprivation.

However, beginning in 2008, poverty in Mexico started to be measured using a multidimensional approach that considers the place where people live, their income level, and the availability of infrastructure, services, and basic rights to which a given family has access. Regarding income, CONEVAL established two poverty thresholds: moderate poverty and extreme poverty.

For extreme poverty, the minimum monthly income thresholds for June 2020 were established at MXN 1,640.00 and MXN 1,170.92 for urban and rural localities, respectively. Income below these levels is considered extreme income poverty. For the same period, the minimum monthly income thresholds required to avoid moderate income poverty were established at MXN 3,202.64 and MXN 2,086.57 for urban and rural localities, respectively.

Nevertheless, multidimensional poverty, as noted above, goes beyond income and includes the enjoyment of six basic rights or services: education, health, social security, food, housing, and access to basic services. Access to basic services includes water, sanitation, electricity, and cooking fuels within the household.

Therefore, in Mexico, a household is not considered poor if and only if its income is above the moderate poverty line and it experiences no deprivation in any of the six social dimensions mentioned above. If it has at least one deprivation but its income remains above the poverty line, it is considered a non-poor household with social deprivations.

Households experiencing moderate multidimensional poverty are those whose income falls below the moderate poverty line and who experience at least one social deprivation, while households in extreme multidimensional poverty are those whose income falls below the extreme poverty line and who experience at least three social deprivations.

When considering poverty and its relationship with energy, several related concepts emerge: energy poverty, energy access, energy marginalization, and energy vulnerability. Each of these concepts is related to the measurement of multidimensional poverty in Mexico.

For example, a family whose income exceeds the moderate poverty line may decide to move to a rural area located far from the electrical grid. As a result, it becomes a household experiencing deprivation because it lacks access to energy. It has the ability to pay, but it does not have access to energy. Consequently, lack of access to energy does not necessarily imply energy poverty.

In contrast, a household may have access to energy, but the cost of electricity, gas, and gasoline consumption may compromise other essential needs such as food, health care, education, or clothing. As a result, the household may choose to consume less energy than is optimal. In such cases, we may be witnessing energy vulnerability in terms of household economics or thermal comfort.

On the other hand, what happens when a household not only lacks sufficient income to support optimal electricity consumption but also lacks access to energy altogether? One could argue that such a situation goes beyond energy vulnerability and may be considered energy marginalization, as households in these circumstances are often forced to migrate from their communities of origin.

Perhaps we could begin by understanding energy poverty as a condition in which there is a lack, deficiency, or insufficiency of economic, technical, or social conditions necessary to access or maintain an optimal level of energy consumption that satisfies the essential needs for a household’s subsistence, development, and comfort.

Surely, especially if they are experts in the field, readers may find this definition insufficient for a topic of such importance to modern societies. Nevertheless, I believe it serves as a useful starting point for reflection and for encouraging debate on how to understand and assess energy poverty in Mexico and around the world. Perhaps in the future we will have the opportunity to explore this issue in greater depth here. For now, thank you for reading and sharing.

This article was originally published in Pensamiento Libre Magazine. ISSN 2007-5685.
Date: August 24, 2020
Original Link: https://www.revistapensamientolibre.com/single-post/2020/08/24/pobreza-energ%C3%A9tica-por-d%C3%B3nde-empezar [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210613144455/https://www.revistapensamientolibre.com/single-post/2020/08/24/pobreza-energ%C3%A9tica-por-d%C3%B3nde-empezar [Archived]

The Waste of the Present










“Our use of fossil sources pushes us to a point of no return.”

– Barack Obama

The massification of the automobile allowed an energy transition, particularly of the energy used for mobility. This allowed solving complicated public problems that the great cities of that time, such as New York and London, faced because of the waste of horses, the main means of transportation of that time, in the form of manure, urine and corpses.

However, despite the problems it solved, the adoption of new forms of energy and technologies brought with them their own problems. Although the waste of today, related to fossil sources, is multivariate and presents its own challenges, for example, used tires, batteries, coal mining or the used automobiles themselves, its most characteristic byproduct is greenhouse gas emissions.

The massification of the automobile and the development of electric plants based on fossil sources such as mineral coal and petroleum derivatives generated an increase in the emission of greenhouse gases, which made evident a series of social and environmental problems.

Global warming began to gain relevance in the world starting in the 1990s, particularly with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. The topic addressed particularly was the link between greenhouse gas emissions with the use of fossil sources of energy, with global warming, and the latter with climate change.

By the 1900s, the increase in the temperature of the Earth had been 0.2 degrees Celsius; with the massification of automobiles in the 1950s, an increase of 0.5 degrees Celsius was reached compared with the average temperature of the second half of the nineteenth century. By the year 2000, it had already reached 0.7 degrees and in 2018–2019 an increase of 1.2 degrees Celsius.

Undoubtedly, the economic, scientific, technological and social development of the world is intimately linked to a greater availability of energy, which opened a world of possibilities to expand the frontier of expansion of the global economy at an important cost: climate change.

It would not be fair to say that there were alternatives because, as I indicated in last week’s article, in the past there were also environmental impacts that were unsustainable in the long term. However, it is important to note that it is this public problem of global character that is the main reason why the international community has pressed for an accelerated energy transition based on the decrease in the intensity of the use of fossil sources of energy and greater use of renewable energy sources and storage.

Many solid advances have been made along that path; solar and wind have now contributed 10% of the energy consumed in the world, while generation based on mineral coal has lost almost the same amount, 8% in the same period, in such a way that it is not impossible to think that in a not very distant future we could see its replacement as a primary source of energy.

However, renewable and green sources, storage, electric automobiles, hydrogen and other technologies that are defining the future of energy, do they not generate waste, refuse or residues of some kind? The answer is yes, and just as in the past the horse generated an impact on the environment and today fossil sources do as well, it is a fact that in the future, energy waste will also change and we will talk about that next week. Until then.

This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: August 19, 2020
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/basura-del-presente-energia-circular-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210306233903/https://businessinsider.mx/basura-del-presente-energia-circular-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez/ [Archived]

The Waste of the Past








“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses”

– Henry Ford

The waste and refuse of an era are associated with the dominant technology. That is, the waste of the past is not the same as the waste of the present and, rest assured, the waste of the future will have new characteristics that today are not analyzed in great depth. With this in mind, this week we open a series of three installments to analyze the waste, refuse and residues related to energy in the past, present and future.

To speak of the past, we will not go back to the ice age, but to the zenith of the energy model prior to the massification of internal combustion automobiles, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, when transportation powered by the muscle of animals dominated, particularly by horses.

The main source of energy of this means of transportation was, precisely, food and, of course, it required maintenance and particular spare parts, for example, the changing of horseshoes, medicine, water and an appropriate place for rest. As you can imagine, the main waste of that transportation system was the manure and urine of the horses that fell directly onto the streets and, of course, their corpses when they passed to a better life.

It is estimated that in New York more than 600 liters of urine and more than three tons of manure were poured per day. Additionally, each year more than 15,000 horse corpses were discarded per day, which represented a replacement rate of between 15% and 20% per year. In other words, demand was growing and so was the need to raise more horses.

This situation generated jobs and entrepreneurs did business. For example, the excess of urine required that the streets be washed several times a day and for this, carts were created that transported water with this function and government workers were in charge of washing the streets. For their part, organized manure collectors and depots appeared who charged for lifting and disposing of the waste. More than 20,000 horses and mules were used in New York for the tasks of collection and disposal of waste and street washing.

However, this mobility model also generated damage to health. It is estimated that in the 1900s, in New York, around 20,000 people died per year because of diseases related to horse waste that were transmitted through the air. Therefore, the collection and disposal of waste was fundamental.

Given the growth projections, most historians agree that the use of the horse was not sustainable in the long term for three reasons: the management of waste, the increase in the cost of horse food that was already becoming more expensive than coal and because of the methane emissions that would have been released into the atmosphere due to a world mobilized by horses.

On the other hand, coal was the primary energy source for thermoelectric generation, steam engines and mobilization by railroad and ships. Therefore, in addition to the environmental impacts in its extraction, greenhouse gas emissions were also generated. In such a way that the great industrial cities of the time were characterized by soot, black clouds and poor air quality.

Although today hydrocarbons have become the villains to defeat in order to mitigate climate change, their adoption in the first quarter of the twentieth century allowed a first energy transition that helped improve the management of manure and coal and more. We will analyze this next week. Until then.

This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: August 12, 2020
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/basura-del-pasado-energia-circular-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez/ [offline]
Archived Link: No server is available to handle this request. [Archived]