Nearly 1.4 billion people in the World suffer from extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is defined as someone who cannot match living on $1.25 per day in the U.S. in 2005. This definition has been adopted by the United Nations and the World Bank to evaluate the World’s economic status.¹

How many people do you know that live on $1.25 per day? What is more, how many people living on $1.25 per day can afford $4.00 per gallon gasoline? The cost of crude oil influences virtually every consumer because transportation is central to everything from commuting to work to purchasing canned goods from the grocery store. Energy costs suppress the poor even further because these costs represent a larger fraction of total income.

Many technologies show promise as an alternative to traditional hydrocarbon fuels. Which technologies, however, are both efficient and available to the poor? The World’s energy problems are closely linked to poverty and great opportunity exists to contribute. Otherwise, we may have the same problem with the cost of solar energy 50 years from now.

1. “The bottom 1.4 billion” The Economist, 2008 (388), 8595, p. 70.

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