By Robert Bryce
Forbes Energy

About 115 people were burned alive after a fuel tanker caught fire in Sierra Leone.

The defining inequality in the world today is the staggering disparity between the energy rich and the energy poor. That disparity came into gruesome focus yet again last week in Sierra Leone.

On November 5, while several thousand policymakers, researchers, and climate activists at the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow were trying to forge agreements on how to slash consumption of hydrocarbons, about 115 people were burned alive while trying to collect gasoline from a damaged fuel tanker truck near Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown.

According to the Washington Post, “People had crowded around the crash to collect leaking fuel when the tanker blew up, witnesses said. Anything spilled was viewed as wasteful in a community where many struggled to afford gas.” One witness described the scene, “dead bodies all around...There are people screaming, people burning alive.”

One witness said, “The firefighters came, but there was nothing they could do...The blaze was so much. There was nothing they could do to contain the inferno.”

Accidents like the one in Freetown are chillingly common. Since 2019, more than 400 people have died in accidents similar to the one in Freetown. The circumstances are almost always the same: a fuel tanker truck gets involved in an accident. Large crowds of desperate people assemble, excited about the prospect of free fuel. Then, due to an errant spark or a careless cigarette, the fuel is ignited and dozens of people are immolated.

These deaths - all of them - are deaths of extreme energy poverty. While energy elites insist we need to drastically reduce our use of coal, oil and natural gas, hundreds of millions of people are living in grinding energy poverty and they will do whatever they have to do to get the energy they need.

The disparities in global energy consumption are gobsmacking. Today, about 3.3 billion people are living in places where per-capita electricity use is less than what’s used by an average American kitchen refrigerator. All over the developing world, people die premature deaths due to indoor air pollution caused by the use of poor-quality cooking fuels.

The average African consumes about 15 times less energy than the average resident of North America. The situation in Sierra Leone, a small country on Africa’s west coast, is even more dire. Electricity use in Sierra Leone is so low that the World Bank doesn’t publish data for it. By my calculations, based on the country’s population of about 8 million, the average resident of the country uses less than 40 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. That is not a misprint. For comparison, the average resident of the U.S. consumes about 13,000 kilowatt-hours of juice per year, or about 300 times as much.

I’ve been collecting stories about death-by-immolation among the energy destitute. Here are a few of them.

In January 2019, in Hidalgo, Mexico, about 85 people were burned alive while trying to collect gasoline from a pipeline that had been illegally tapped. The Associated Press report on the accident was somber and elegiac. “The lure of free fuel was irresistible for many: They came like moths to a flame, parking vehicles on a nearby road.”

The report continued, “This particular section of pipeline had come back into service after being offline for nearly four weeks when somebody punctured the line again....Hundreds showed up at the spigot, carrying plastic jugs and covering their faces with bandanas. A few threw rocks and swung sticks at soldiers who tried to shoo them away. Some fuel collectors brought their children along...What ignited the gasoline, no one seems to know. After the explosion, soldiers formed a perimeter around an area the size of a soccer field where townspeople were incinerated by the fireball, reduced to clumps of ash and bones.”

In May 2019, in Niger, 76 people died after an overturned tanker truck exploded as crowds tried to collect spilled fuel.

In July 2019, in Nigeria, a similar accident killed at least 45. As reported by the BBC: “People had gathered around the crashed tanker after the crash, with some attempting to salvage fuel.”

In August 2019, about 64 people were killed in a similar accident in Tanzania. Per a news report, “People were trying to recover fuel from the vehicle, which had overturned on a major road, when it exploded.”

In July of this year, in Kenya, at least 13 people were killed in yet another accident. “People had rushed to the scene with jerrycans to siphon off fuel from the overturned tanker before it exploded.”

About a month later, in Lebanon, which is in the midst of an ongoing energy crisis, at least 28 people died when a fuel tank exploded. According to Reuters, the Lebanese army “had seized a fuel storage tank hidden by black marketeers and was handing out gasoline to residents when the explosion occurred.”

On Wednesday, at the COP 26 confab in Glasgow, a draft agreement was being circulated that called for “just transitions to net-zero emissions.” But the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality. Amid the never-ending talk about net-zero and bans on hydrocarbons, it’s essential to remember those 400 dead, those mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters in Sierra Leone, in Lebanon, Tanzania, Kenya, and elsewhere who were burned alive.

Those people didn’t die because of climate change. They died trying to get the fuel they need to live.

Robert Bryce is an author, journalist, filmmaker, and the host of the Power Hungry Podcast. He has been writing about energy, power, innovation, and politics for more than three decades. Bryce has authored six books in which he has covered Enron’s bankruptcy, corn ethanol, digital drilling rigs, renewables, batteries, nuclear energy, and the future of the electric grid. His latest book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, was published in 2020. His articles have appeared in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Post, and Sydney Morning Herald. His feature-length documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains the World, is available on iTunes, Amazon Prime, and myriad other streaming services. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Lorin, who is an art teacher, photographer, and master potter.  Follow Bryce on Twitter: @pwrhungry.