Wake-Up Call: World Energy Outlook Under Business as Usual

The International Energy Agency's latest World Energy Outlook is a sobering document. It spells out what will happen to energy consumption, supply and demand, as well as CO2 emissions, if we do nothing, continue on with business-as-usual. This is the future as written on the energy side of the climate coin, and the message is fundamentally the same: we've got just 10 years to develop a new relationship to fossil fuels.

It's not the message the New York Times carried. They gave it a parochial and self-righteous reading. The headline said it all: Cuts Urged in China's and India's Energy Growth. So that industrialized nations can continue with business as usual?

Perhaps I'm naive and that was indeed the sub-text of the IEA report. After all the IEA was founded in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973-74 by industrialized nations to protect their oil supplies. Right now, the greatest threat is coming from the soaring demand for energy supplies from China and India, and the report is not shy about quantifying the current situation:

If governments around the world stick with current policies the world’s energy needs would be well over 50% higher in 2030 than today. China and India together account for 45% of the increase in demand.

That's a statement that can explain the finger-pointing headline, but there's a lot more in the 600+ page report to suggest a more constructive response to the coming transformation of the global energy economy. For example:

China’s per-capita emissions in 2030 are only 40% of those of the United States and about two-thirds of [other industrialized nations]. In India, they remain far lower than those of [industrialized nations], even though they grow faster than in almost any other region.

In other words, despite soaring consumption, 23 years from now the average Chinese person will still be consuming less than half as much energy as the average American. For the average Indian citizen, it is even less. Who is telling China and India to cut consumption, and by what authority?

There's another story that the IEA is telling. Each of these sentences is loaded with implications, and implicit criticism of the prevailing inaction and slow pace of real response.

The primary scarcity facing the planet is not of natural resources nor money, but time. Investment now being made in energy-supply infrastructure will lock in technology for decades, especially in power generation. The next ten years will be crucial, as the pace of expansion in energy-supply infrastructure is expected to be particularly rapid. China’s and India’s energy challenges are the world’s energy challenges, which call for collective responses. No major energy consumer can be confident of secure supply if supplies to others are at risk. And there can be no effective long-term solution to the threat of climate change unless all major energy consumers contribute.

Despite all the media noise about global warming and the greening of mass discourse, nothing significant has yet been done. It's still business as usual, and here's what that means by 2030:

• Oil consumption will rise 37%
• Coal consumption will rise 73%
• Electricity consumption will double
• Greenhouse gas emissions will jump 57%

Putting on the brakes and turning the global energy juggernaut in a different direction is essential, not only to solve climate, but also for the stability of the world economy and to assure international security. The IEA report mentions a lever we can pull. This business as usual scenario will require $22 trillion of investment in supply infrastructure. Is there a way to redirect the awesome force of that capital to smarter alternatives?

Perhaps, but leadership equipped with the ability to think synthetically and honestly is lacking. The IEA report and the IPCC's report on global warming due to be issued at the end of next week bookend the true global predicament. The US response, as Michael Klare describes it in The Nation in an article called Beyond the Age of Petroleum, is heartbreakingly destructive.

First, the government will seek to ease the qualms of major energy investors by promising to protect their overseas investments through the deployment of American military forces; and second, the industry will seek to hedge its bets by shifting an ever-increasing share of its investment funds into the development of nonpetroleum liquids. [i.e. ethanol, oil shale, tar sands and coal-to-liquids]

If you follow the money, it's hard to argue with Klare's assessment. The latest budget floated for the war in Iraq? $200 billion, on top of about $400 billion already allocated. The budget for Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Address the Energy and Climate Crisis? $15 billion.

Crumbs off the table of the federal budget, business-as usual. (Click here for more on whether $15 billion is enough.)

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