0191 -9067/81 /0403 29-07802.00/0 Copyright ® 1981 SUNSAT Energy Council THE SOLAR POWER SATELLITE — AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THIRD WORLD DEVELOPMENT RASHM1 MAYUR and PETER E. GLASER SUNSAT Energy Council THE DILEMMA OF DEPLETING ENERGY SOURCES The multitude of challenges facing the Third World seems insurmountable. While the developed countries are getting richer, the developing countries are continuing to suffer the consequences of expanding populations, depleting resources, and grinding poverty. One of the most serious causes underlying this critical situation is the escalating prices and reduced availability of energy. The global energy situation is at the top of the agenda of contemporary society and is likely to remain of vital concern to every nation well into the 21st century. As a result, the means to deal with both the short- and long-term effects of complex energy supply and demand issues, particularly for developing countries, is engaging the attention of policy makers and is being hotly debated in public forums. The debates tend to be only between optimists and pessimists. The optimists are sure that they have a technological fix to deal with every specific aspect of the energy problem; the pessimists see in every proposed solution a plethora of unresolved risks. There is often a reluctance to pursue the arduous route of research, experiment, and compromise which can lead to practical solutions. Never has the search for new energy resources been more acute than now. Never before have so many millions of people experienced such privation and lived in misery, particularly in the Third World. In spite of massive technological developments, the gap in living standards between the industrialized countries of the North, and the developing countries of the South, has been widening. The best measure of this gap is the per capita utilization of energy, which in the developed countries is greater than in developing countries by at least tenfold. Combining per capita utilization of energy with projected population growth, the global energy demand is projected to increase fivefold during the next 50 years, which would place intolerable burdens on the global ecosystem. Conventional nonrenewable energy sources that are based on fossil fuels or uranium are unlikely to meet this unprecedented energy demand without potentially dire environmental consequences. Therefore, human ingenuity must be directed towards finding energy resources which provide hope for Third World countries to increase Presented at the United Nations Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy, Nairobi, 10-21 August 1981. United Nations Paper A/CONF. 100/NGO/3. Address correspondence to Frederick H. Osborn, Executive Secretary, SUNSAT Energy Council, Box 201, Cold Spring, NY 10516, USA.
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