In the midst of pointing out how off-the-charts happy Costa Ricans are during his brilliant TED talk on the Happy Planet Index, Statistician Nic Marks casually lets it drop that 99 percent of electricity in Costa Rica comes from renewable energy sources. Wait. What!? Ninety-nine as in one less than one hundred? Did you know that? We must have missed the memo.
A mind-blowing 82 percent of Costa Rica’s electricity is hydro-electric (from dams), so it’s clean as a cucumber. (Note: some environmentalists now oppose large scale hydro as damaging to the environment and native peoples, but it is clean in the sense that nothing burns, unlike the setting dirty ol’ coal on fire, which is how the U.S. gets half its electric power.) The other big chunk of Costa Rican electricity comes from solar energy, geothermal energy, wind energy, and the burning of sugarcane waste. Less than five percent of their electricity comes from fossil fuels.
Sure, Costa Rica only has 4.2 million citizens who need power, but this portfolio is still hugely impressive…right up there with Norway, New Zealand, Iceland, and Monaco. It turns out, in fact, that Costa Rica is vying to become the world’s first carbon neutral country. They want to do this by 2021, just in time to celebrate 200 years of independence.
Independence indeed. Could that be why Costa Ricans are so happy? Nic Marks is exploring the connection. His Happy Planet Index measures “the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens.” The index proves high levels of resource consumption don’t necessarily produce high levels of well-being, and that it’s possible to create societal happiness without over-consumption of natural resources. It also reveals there are different paths to achieving identical levels of well-being. The model followed by the West, he points out, can provide longevity and moderate levels of satisfaction, but only at a deeply unsustainable resource cost.
The Costa Ricans appear to be enviably on their game in the forging of a much brighter, much more sustainable path for themselves. What might the United States learn from this?
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