Green Energy

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

That basicly gurantees right to energy and would cover all examples given above. Housing without proper heating, in an enviroment were it is needed is no longer housing. Spoiled food is not longer food and medical service do include having energy for medical devices.

Ethically speaking? Yes. Legally speaking? No, and it never will be, at least not in the US.

There's two ways that energy access could be considered a human right.

In one way, energy access is considered a human right in that everyone is given energy for free.

In the other way, energy access is considered a human right in that everyone has the right to purchase possess and utilize energy.

Something I think a lot of the current group of activists don't understand is that without energy, people die en masse. And they want to end access to energy, which isn't good. In much of the world, if you can't hit your home over the winter, you're dead. We also require energy to grow food, to transport food, to build and maintain shelter. Energy is simply an important thing. If anyone tries to make it so that individuals are locked out of acquiring energy, that's certainly something that would be effectively a death sentence. To be less abstract, if we were to tell certain people that they are not allowed to buy food, that certainly would be considered an atrocity.

On the other hand, when people say that something is a human right and therefore people need to be given it free of charge, that's a very dangerous cliff. The energy has to come from somewhere, and it's not easy to acquire. Even unimaginably huge sources of energy such as major hydroelectric dams still have a limited amount of power available, and pricing systems are a way to manage the scarce resource.

That being said, I think that there is a moral element to governments using taxpayer money to produce common goods such as hydroelectric dams to produce energy long term for the people represented by that government. By engaging in such projects, even if they are not going to give the power away for free, and they are making it available for the people, which in my view would fulfill a right to energy, particularly if there's enough energy to provide it at a relatively low cost.

My early thought was: how can energy be a human right when you have people living remote and far from the grid?

Suppose Alice and Bob both need an organ transplant. Only one viable organ is available. In that case, it is /impossible/ to protect the human right to live for both people. But we do not say “welp, guess we have to scrap the right to live as a human right”. We maintain the right to live as a human right even though protecting that right is impossible in some situations. If an ER doc decides to save Alice and let Bob die and he gets dragged into court for violating Bob’s human rights, the doc obviously has a strong defense that he was forced. The other human rights violation is that the two people were not treated as equals. The defense would be that if you let them both die to treat them as equals, the right to live was denied in more cases than needed.

So w.r.t. energy, we could still declare energy is a human right (or claim that it inherently follows from other declared rights) despite the impossibility of serving everyone.

Energy in the technical sense has always been a human right as we would literally die without it (ATP production kind of requires it and sunlight tends to power food production too)

If by energy you mean electricity or chemical energy in convenient containers (like butane canisters) then no but improving access would extend lives and reduce the total environmental pollution if done properly. As there is not an upper bound on how much every one could claim they need and lack of access to energy efficient options would make the lower bound insufficient for most people to live off.

I don’t think it would make sense. Better have access to: clean water, food, (temperature regulated) housing, low cost entertainment, medicine

Legit just let people live, not just surviving, and will be enough

Define "access".

Should everyone have access to pay for the energy they consume? Sure.

Should they be granted free energy they aren't paying for? Um, erm, well...