TED.com
December 2010
I was only four years old when I saw my
mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. That was a
great day for my mother. My mother and father had been saving money for years
to be able to buy that machine. And the first day it was going to be used, even
Grandma was invited to see the machine. And Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life she had been
heating water with firewood, and she had hand washed laundry for seven
children. And now she was going to watch electricity do that work.
My mother carefully opened the door, and
she loaded the laundry into the machine, like this. And then, when she closed
the door, Grandma said, "No, no, no, no. Let me, let me push the
button." And Grandma pushed the button, and she said, "Oh, fantastic.
I want to see this. Give me a chair. Give me a chair. I want to see it."
And she sat down in front of the machine, and she watched the entire washing
program. She was mesmerized. To my
grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.
Today, in Sweden and other rich
countries, people are using so many different machines. Look, the homes are
full of machines; I can't even name them all. And they also, when they want to
travel, they use flying machines that can take them to remote destinations. And
yet, in the world, there are so many people who still heat the water on fire,
and they cook their food on fire. Sometimes they don't even have enough food.
And they live below the poverty line. There are two billion fellow human beings
who live on less than two dollars a
day. And the richest people over there -- there's one billion people -- and
they live above what I call the air line, because they spend more than $80 a
day on their consumption.
But this is just one, two, three billion
people, and obviously there are seven billion people in the world, so there
must be one, two, three, four billion people more, who live in between the
poverty and the air line. They have electricity, but the question is, how many
have washing machines? I've done the scrutiny
of market data, and I've found that, indeed, the washing machine has penetrated
below the air line, and today there's an additional one billion people out
there who live above the wash line. And they consume more than $40 per day. So
two billion have access to washing machines.
And the remaining five billion, how do
they wash? Or, to be more precise, how do most of the women in the world wash?
Because it remains hard work for women to wash. They wash like this: by hand.
It's a hard, time-consuming labor, which they have to do for hours every week.
And sometimes they also have to bring water from far away to do the laundry at
home. Or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off. And they want the washing machine. They don't want
to spend such a large part of their life doing this hard work with so
relatively low productivity. And there's nothing different in their wish than
it was for my grandma. Look here, two generations ago in Sweden -- picking
water from the stream, heating with firework and washing like that. They want
the washing machine in exactly the same way.
But when I lecture to environmentally-concerned students,
they tell me, "No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing
machines." How can we tell this woman that she ain't going to have a
washing machine? And then I ask my students, I've asked them -- over the last
two years I've asked, "How many of you doesn't use a car?" And some
of them proudly raise their hand and say, "I don't use a car." And
then I put the really tough question: "How many of you hand wash your
jeans and your bed sheets?" And no one raised their hand. Even the hardcore in the green movement use
washing machines.
So how
come this is something that everyone uses and they think others will not
stop it; what is special with this? I had to do an analysis about the energy
used in the world. Here we are. Look here, you see the seven billion people up
there: the air people, the wash people, the bulb people and the fire people.
One unit like this is an energy unit of fossil
fuel -- oil, coal or gas. That's what most of electricity and the energy in
the world is. And it's 12 units used in the entire world, and the richest one
billion, they use six of them. Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the
world's population. And these ones who have washing machines, but not a house
full of other machines, they use two. This group uses three, one each. And they
also have electricity. And over there they don't even use one each. That makes
12 of them.
But the main concern for the
environmentally-interested students -- and they are right -- is about the
future. What are the trends? If we
just prolong the trends, without any real advanced analysis, to 2050, there are
two things that can increase the energy use. First, population growth. Second,
economic growth. Population growth will mainly occur among the poorest people here,
because they have high child mortality and they have many children per woman.
And [with] that you will get two extra, but that won't change the energy use
very much.
What will happen is economic growth. The
best of here in the emerging economies -- I call them the New East -- they will
jump the air line. "Wopp!" they will say. And they will start to use
as much as the Old West are doing already. And these people, they want the
washing machine. I told you. They'll go there. And they will double their energy
use. And we hope that the poor people will get into the electric light. And
they'll get a two child family without a stop in population growth. But the
total energy consumption will increase to 22 units. And these 22 units still
the richest people use most of it. So what needs to be done? Because the risk,
the high probability of climate change is real. It's real. Of course they must
be more energy efficient. They must change behavior in some way. They must also
start to produce green energy, much more green energy. But until they have the
same energy consumption per person, they shouldn't give advice to others --
what to do and what not to do. Here we can get more green energy all over.
This is what we hope may happen. It's a
real challenge in the future. But I can assure you that this woman in the
favela in Rio, she wants a washing machine. She's very happy about her minister
of energy that provided electricity to everyone -- so happy that she even voted
for her. And she became Dilma Rousseff, the president elect of one of the
biggest democracies in the world -- moving from minister of energy to
president. If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They
love them.
And what's the magic with them? My
mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She
said, "Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry; the machine will make the
work. And now we can go to the library." Because this is the magic: you
load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of
the machines, children's books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved
this. I got the "ABC." This is where I started my career as a
professor, when my mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for
herself. She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. And
she read so many novels, so many different novels here. And we really, we
really loved this machine.
And what we said, my mother and me,
"Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical
processing industry that gave us time to read books." Thank you very much.
Dr Rosling’s Bio
Hans Rosling (born July 27, 1948 in Uppsala, Sweden) is Professor of
International Health at Karolinska Institute and Director of the Gapminder
Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system. From 1967 to 1974
he studied statistics and medicine at Uppsala University, and in 1972 he
studied public health at St John's Medical College, Bangalore. He became a
licensed physician in 1976 and from 1979 to 1981 he served as District Medical
Officer in Nacala in northern Mozambique.
Research
On 21 August 1981, Rosling discovered an outbreak (= the appearance,
start) of a paralysing disease known as konzo, and described in 1938. The
investigations that followed earned him a Ph.D. degree at Uppsala University in
1986. He spent two decades studying outbreaks of this disease in remote rural
areas across Africa and supervised more than ten Ph.D. students. Outbreaks
occur among hunger-stricken rural populations in Africa where a diet dominated
by insufficiently processed cassava
results in simultaneous malnutrition and high dietary cyanide intake.
Other work
Rosling's research has also focused on other links between economic
development, agriculture, poverty and health in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
He has been health adviser to WHO, UNICEF and several aid agencies. In 1993 he
was one of the initiators of Médecins
sans frontières in Sweden. At Karolinska Institutet he was head of the
Division of International Health (IHCAR) from 2001 to 2007. As chairman of
Karolinska International Research and Training Committee (1998—2004) he started
health research collaborations with universities in Asia, Africa, the Middle
East and Latin America. He started new courses on Global Health and co-authored
a textbook on Global Health that promotes a fact-based world view. In 2009 he
was listed as one of 100 leading global thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine.
Glossary
throughout all one’s life = until the
end of one’s life, all through, for the whole of
to be mesmerised = fascinated, enthralled,
attracted
live on (…….€) = subsist on, consume
scrutiny = study, examination, analysis
a stream far off = a small river far away
from home
the hardcore = the uncompromising group
of people, radical, committed, diehard
how come? = why is this the case?, why has
this happened?
trends = tendencies, fashion
steel mill = factory, plant for processing
steel (=acero) = siderurgia
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