Jacqueline Novogratz

I want to share with you a plan to fix one of the biggest planetary market failures of our lifetime.

It's been nearly 150 years since Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, ushering in the age of electricity.

So how can it be that 700 million people on this planet still lack access to electricity?

When the sun goes down, they depend on dirty,

expensive, sometimes dangerous fuels for light.

And these are some of the most overlooked and underestimated people on the planet.

But we can solve this problem if we have the moral imagination to do two things.

First, we have to rethink how we approach risk.

And second,

we have to address the false binary between mitigation, or reducing emissions, and adaptation, or adjusting to the climate crisis.

Before we talk about that, though, let's look at what's at stake.

We know that the most vulnerable are disproportionately impacted by climate events.

Electricity is resilience.

It's agency.

It's light and irrigation and communications, and it's cooling.

It's also basic empowerment.

We live in an age where tech entrepreneurs are promising that every child on the planet will have their own AI tutor, unless you're a child without access to electricity.

The good news is that, as we've discussed, solar energy has been one of the great success stories of the 21st century.

When my organization, Acumen, started investing in off-grid electricity in 2007, 1.5 billion people on the planet had no access to electricity.

Today, that number's been cut in half.