Energy, Vol.153, 671-684, 2018
Energy use analysis in the presence of quality of life, poverty, health, and carbon dioxide emissions
Access to clean energy has a positive impact on societies, whereas excessive extraction of fossil fuels along with population growth, traps the world into serious problems. Global energy strategy is a manner to find a balance between positive and negative impacts of energy on societies, especially their quality of life. This paper proposes a framework to choose a decent global energy strategy in the presence of five factors including final energy consumption, quality of life, poverty, health, and carbon dioxide emissions. The core of the framework is "Trade-off Analysis", which its outputs are analyzed by three defined scenarios in the presence of total population. According to the results, mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions and preservation of the natural energy sources are two factors with a higher priority to encourage developed countries to reduce energy consumption. In case of developing countries, in addition to the two previous factors, the poverty and quality of life are next priorities. For pre-developing countries, the first priority is poverty reduction, then health and quality of life improvement. Thereby, the paper proposes the eco-sufficiency and eco-efficiency policies for developed and developing countries respectively, while energy poverty policy for pre-developing countries. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.