This is partly a rerun of my diary earlier this week, but I'm posting this because its content got
published in the Financial Times this morning, in the form copied below.
I'll also use the opportunity to encourage you to read Richard Heinberg's Open Letter to Greg Palast on the topic of Peak Oil - it's one of the best introductions to the issue.
Energy security is in fact entirely within our own control
Sir, Quentin Peel and Carola Hoyos, in their article "Eyeing energy supplies from opposite ends of a telescope" (July 4), provide an excellent summary of the issues associated with the catchphrase of "energy security", including the "security of demand" worries of the Russians and global warming. However, the article makes one major unsaid assumption: it takes demand growth as a given, or, worse, as a necessity, accepting the hypothesis of an unbreakable link between progress, gross domestic product growth and growth in energy consumption.
The way we count resource extraction as value creation rather than depletion of natural capital makes it look cheaper or more effective to work on boosting production than on reducing consumption, but is it?
Is it really easier to compromise with the Saudis, spark a new cold war with Vladimir Putin, spar with the Chinese and the Indians while enriching countless corrupt regimes (including avowed enemies) than to make a small effort at home to avoid these imports by not needing them - simply by using less energy, as we know is possible?
Energy security is actually an energy demand problem, and is entirely within our own control. If we waste less, if we consume in smarter ways, if we accept that energy is a precious resource that we can no longer take for granted, then we will have a chance to reach energy security. Otherwise we will just be pushing the problem a few years further each time we open up a new country to investment or find a new way to extract a bit more oil or gas or coal.
Maybe a few years more is good enough for us. But will it be good enough for our children? The solution is in our own hands.
Jérôme Guillet,
Editor,
European Tribune,
