Resource Decentralisation

One of the major issues with the environmentalist/sustainability/climate change debate is why the developing countries should restrict their standard of living because of the excesses of the western world – especially the US.
But the normal articulation of the problem skips over one key step in the argument. The implicit assumption is that it is not possible to have a high standard of living without the excesses. But a large percentage of the resources expended in the developed countries add nothing to the lifestyle of their citizens. There is enormous amounts of waste which are inherent in almost every part of the system. Removing this waste could allow the same end result with much less raw materials.
Waste is generally a consequence of inefficiencies. And the supply side of is constrained by mechanisms and processes put in place a hundred years ago.
Consider for instance, power supply. It is enormously inefficient to generate power in massive facilities and then ship it across distances the size of a country. Transmission lines use very high voltage because this reduces losses in the line. Even so, carrying the power over hundred of kilometres means that a large percentage is lost. How much better it would be to generate the power at the point it is to be used. [Aside: this is the mechanism used in cars or gas appliances. The energy is generated at the point of use by burning a suitable fuel. The trouble is that you still have to move the fuel to the usage location.]
There are a number of reasons why this solution has been locked in; not least of which is the enormous investment made into power stations and associated infrastructure (such as transmission lines). However, while new technologies do not YET afford a practical alternative, they are not far off. Concerted effort driven by an urgent need (such as climate change?) is likely to lead to fairly rapid progress. The problem is that there is not such a drive in the western world which already has the expensive infrastructure in place and additions can be considered incremental costs (although fairly large increments given the cost of power stations).
However, the developing world has not yet made as much commitment to existing paradigms. Although, there is some and they do provide a significant barrier to alternatives, they are no where near as difficult to pass as in the ‘developed’ countries. The barrier is even lower in places such as much of Africa where there is no established infrastructure. There is no real reason why such places should not leap-frog the cul-de-sac that the European settled countries find themselves in.
Assisting small countries to develop localised utilities (water, power, communications etc.) in the same way that they also have localised food sources would allow relatively rapid improvement to those areas. At the same time the advances could be included in developed worlds as supplements to the existing infrastructure, with the aim of eventual replacement.