HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

SPECIAL REPORT by EurActiv*,  29 November 2012 — UN plans to double the world’s renewable energy capacity within two decades are under threat from fossil-fuel handouts, which have almost doubled in three years, campaigners say.

**Traffic slows to a crawl on the Monash Freeway in Melbourne, Australia through peak hour traffic. | fir0002 | flagstaffotos.com.au

Paris – The global economy is expected to make a hesitant and uneven recovery over the coming two years. Decisive policy action is needed to ensure that stalemate over fiscal policy in the United States and continuing euroarea instability do not plunge the world back into recession, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Outlook.

Source: OECD

“The world economy is far from being out of the woods,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría said during the Economic Outlook launch in Paris.*

“The US ‘fiscal cliff’, if it materialises, could tip an already weak economy into recession, while failure to solve the euro area crisis could lead to a major financial shock and global downturn,’ he added.

“A global energy outlook cannot just talk about rich countries and ignore the other end of the spectrum.” This is why, for more than a decade, the World Energy Outlook (WEO) has published data and analysis on modern energy access for the poor*. Today, it does so again.

**Women in Madagascar preparing to use wood as their primary energy source. Sub-Saharan Africa scores lowest on the WEO 2012’s Energy Development Index. | Photo by World Resources Institute Staff

The International Energy Agency‘s WEO 2012 finds that, despite progress in the past year, nearly 1.3 billion people have no access to electricity while 2.6 billion must use traditional fuels (such as wood, charcoal, tree leaves, crop residues and animal waste) to cook their food, breathing in noxious smoke as they do so.