Friday, June 03, 2005

Bad energy forecast

Once again I walk away from a conference rather disturbed by what I’ve heard, but still professionally conscious that there are so many other schocking facts that we never really have the time to deal with.
Once again, an hour long barrage of powerpoints with curves all pointing in the wrong direction. You sit there, hoping for one of the speakers to finally pull out a solution. But no.

In this case an international conference on future energy consumption and supply at the national Danish research center Risø.
One speaker, Fatih Birol from IEA, the International Energy Agency, laid out the forecast with considerable institutional authority.

Among the conclusions of the IEA:
- Global energy cosumption will rise 60 % until 2030
- Almost all of the growth will be in the developing world
- There will be NO decoupling of energy use and carbon dioxide emmisions (in other words, the climate is screwed)
- As the oil wells of the EU and US run dry, a dramatically increasing share of the worlds energy will be supplied be a handfull of rather instabil countries, notably Saudi, Russia, Iran, Irag, and Nigeria.

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