Green Energy

There's two ways that energy access could be considered a human right.

In one way, energy access is considered a human right in that everyone is given energy for free.

In the other way, energy access is considered a human right in that everyone has the right to purchase possess and utilize energy.

Something I think a lot of the current group of activists don't understand is that without energy, people die en masse. And they want to end access to energy, which isn't good. In much of the world, if you can't hit your home over the winter, you're dead. We also require energy to grow food, to transport food, to build and maintain shelter. Energy is simply an important thing. If anyone tries to make it so that individuals are locked out of acquiring energy, that's certainly something that would be effectively a death sentence. To be less abstract, if we were to tell certain people that they are not allowed to buy food, that certainly would be considered an atrocity.

On the other hand, when people say that something is a human right and therefore people need to be given it free of charge, that's a very dangerous cliff. The energy has to come from somewhere, and it's not easy to acquire. Even unimaginably huge sources of energy such as major hydroelectric dams still have a limited amount of power available, and pricing systems are a way to manage the scarce resource.

That being said, I think that there is a moral element to governments using taxpayer money to produce common goods such as hydroelectric dams to produce energy long term for the people represented by that government. By engaging in such projects, even if they are not going to give the power away for free, and they are making it available for the people, which in my view would fulfill a right to energy, particularly if there's enough energy to provide it at a relatively low cost.