Sustainable energy policy options in the presence of quality of life, poverty, and CO2 emission

Abstract

Access to clean energy has a positive impact on societies, while excessive extraction of the fossil fuels along with population growth, trap the world into the climate change risks, and environmental degradation. Energy policy is a manner to find balance between positive and negative impacts of energy on society. Although it does not guarantee the fair allocation of quality of life (QoL) among people around the world, but suitable energy policy provides sustainable energy use coincide with acceptable societal QoL. This paper proposes sequences of energy consumption and their priorities for developed, developing, and pre-developing countries. These countries are extracted of a fitted sigmoid function to the QoL data against final energy consumption per capita. To achieve the sigmoid function, factor analysis method is applied to extract QoL indicator from six variables based on 112 countries data during nine years. Moreover, this study emphasizes on CO2 emission, and poverty to take into account their impact on energy policy options. Eco-sufficiency, eco-efficiency, and poverty reduction are proposed for developed, developing, and pre-developing countries, respectively.