Clean Energy: A Human Right
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. […] Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”-Eleanor Roosevelt
The theme of this year’s Human Rights Day relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. It reflects on the need to reconstruct better by ensuring that recovery efforts are essential to human rights. Only if we can establish equal opportunities for all, fix the failures revealed and distorted by COVID-19, and apply human rights principles to counter entrenched, systemic, and intergenerational inequalities, exclusion and discrimination, can we achieve our popular global objectives.
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by world leaders at a historic UN Summit in September 2015, officially entered into force on 1 January 2016. Goal 7 ‘Affordable and clean energy’ is intended to ensure access by 2030 for all to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy. It will notably increase the share of renewable energy sources, increase the global energy efficiency improvements by 2030, and build new energy infrastructures, especially in the least developed countries (LDCs).
Renewable energy is more sustainable and more available to people at all social levels, thanks to innovation. Distributed renewable energy systems, such as micro-hydroelectric systems, solar panels, or wind turbines, can be created near where they are required, including remote communities, among other sources.
Also, new business models and new funding could help out with this transition. Both of these variables appear to be aligned to ensure that no one is left behind in the transition to renewable energy, crucial for climate justice and human rights.
Renewable energy is vital to our transition to a low-carbon economy, but the human rights policies and practices of corporations are not adequate to ensure that this transition is both rapid and equitable.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recognizes the explicit correlation between the two issues. According to the commissioner, “climate change impacts an array of internationally guaranteed human rights, directly and indirectly.” The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), one of the world’s leading environmental science authorities, has highlighted that renewable energy is one of the world’s most significant environmental science institutions. A step toward renewable energy is, therefore, a step toward enhancing human rights.
A clear case for market-leading innovation is the demonstration of new efficiencies directly related to renewable energy. Just ten years ago, solar prices were about $600/MWh, well above the $100/MWh of commonly used coal and natural gas sources. However, five years later, solar costs were halved and compressed again to about $100/MWh today.
Renewable energy supplies, mainly due to an influx of investment, have achieved this stage of cost-effectiveness. We should remember that mass subsidies do not determine this renewable energy benefit. Renewable energy also offers more stabilization and less volatility in market energy prices.
In conclusion, the approach to human rights must be adequately sensitive to similarities and disparities in developed and emerging states’ energy strategies. A human right to access renewable energy is argued to represent intergovernmental issues for both human growth and protection of the environment more adequately.
Such right can meet basic human needs, raise living conditions, preserve good human health, and reduce poverty. However, it also leads to the sustainable use of existing natural resources, climate change prevention, and conservation of the environment.
Author: Yetunde Oyelami
Photo credit: www.saurenergy.com
