The Patriot Post® · The Smoke at Dusk: How Energy Poverty Kills God’s Creation

By Vijay Jayaraj

As a Christian, I have always believed that no one deserves poverty. Scripture reveals a God who “raises the poor from the dust” (Psalm 113:7), and His children must open their hands to the needy. Many churches actively follow that: I have served with churches across the globe, from feeding homeless men on the streets of Vancouver to teaching children in the slum communities of India.

When I entered the field of energy and environment, I learned that the needs of the poor carry layers and nuances. You cannot solve energy poverty with a single cash grant or a stop-gap delivery. The poor need fuel today, and they need a system that keeps fuel flowing tomorrow.

When the Iran war peaked in 2026, cooking gas vanished from millions of kitchens across South Asia. Liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG, reaches most homes in portable cylinders, and India imports about 60 percent of its supply, much of it through the Strait of Hormuz.

The wealthy families plugged in electric stoves. The poor had no such option. They went back to firewood and cow dung. I watched this unfold from my own doorstep. Each evening, daily wage labourers near my home lit their fires to cook dinner, and thick smoke would settle over the entire neighbourhood.

If cooking gas flows at the turn of a knob in your home, energy poverty can feel like a distant idea. The World Health Organization estimates that 2.1 billion people still cook on open fires or crude stoves burning wood, dung, charcoal and kerosene, and that household air pollution caused 2.9 million deaths in 2021, including more than 309,000 children under the age of five.

The church has not ignored the problem. In Kyrgyzstan, Barnabas Aid’s winter assistance delivers coal for heating and food parcels to poor Christian families through local church partners. Households there that sit beyond gas and district-heating networks rely heavily on coal and other solid fuels through winter.

In Lebanon, Caritas Lebanon has given fuel vouchers and cash to families squeezed by an unreliable grid and costly diesel generators. Aid to the Church in Need included heating assistance for needy Lebanese families in its 2021 winter-relief package. The same charity paid for heating fuel at a residence for female students in Syria, a country where the grid supplied only two to four hours of electricity a day as recently as mid-2025.

In Uganda’s refugee settlements, DanChurchAid and the Lutheran World Federation have supplied briquettes, fuel vouchers and portable stoves to families with almost no access to cleaner fuels.

I thank God for every one of these programs. But ask yourself a hard question. What happens next winter? A voucher expires. A sack of coal burns down. Charity can carry a family through a crisis, but it cannot build the pipelines, bottling plants and power stations that end the crisis for good.

That task demands affordable LPG and electricity at a national scale, and South Asia proves it can be done. India launched a program in 2016 to give free LPG connections to women in poor households. By March 2025, the program had released more than 103 million connections, helping more than 200 million transition away from firewood and cow dung.

Electricity tells the same story. From 2000 to 2020, coal supplied roughly three-quarters of India’s power. Over those two decades, electricity access jumped from about 60% to more than 95% of the population, and GDP per capita climbed from $756 to $2,098. In China raised its coal generation more than fivefold after 2000 while its GDP per capita leapt from under $1,000 to above $13,000. Coal powered the factories that helped cut the number of Chinese people living in extreme poverty by close to 800 million over four decades.

Here lies the scandal. The fuels that rescued hundreds of millions of Asians now face an organised campaign of rejection. The World Bank applies climate investment rules that bar financing for LPG, and the European Union keeps a similar ban. At COP26, wealthy nations pledged to end public support for unabated fossil fuels abroad.

The people paying for these pledges do not live in Brussels or Washington. Across Africa, household air pollution kills an estimated 700,000 people each year, more than malaria. About 2.1 billion people worldwide still cook with polluting fuels. Even an African climate group, WePlanet, now begs donors to exempt LPG from fossil fuel finance bans.

God gave humanity dominion over creation (Genesis 1:28) so that we might use its resources to flourish and to serve our neighbor. Coal, oil and gas lie beneath the earth by His providence. Locking them away from the poorest people on the planet is not stewardship. It is neglect presented as virtue. The apostle John asks how God’s love can abide in anyone who sees a brother in need and closes his heart against him (1 John 3:17).

So, what should your church do? Keep the vouchers and coal deliveries flowing, but do not stop there. Pastors, mission boards and denominations must defend the right of poor nations to build gas networks and power plants with the fuels that work. Relief agencies should fund LPG cylinders and grid connections alongside food parcels. Any church leader tempted to sign a climate declaration should first visit a slum at dinnertime and breathe what the poor breathe.

The smoke outside my window cleared once gas returned. Millions elsewhere still wait.

Vijay Jayaraj is Research Associate for Developing Countries with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, and a Visiting Fellow at the U.S. National Center for Energy Analytics. He holds a M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, postgraduate degree in Energy management from Robert Gordon University and has served as a research assistant at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center in Canada.