by Alex Evans | Nov 15, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity
The International Energy Agency published this year’s magnum opus a week or so ago – here’s the Executive Summary (pdf). Key points:
– The Outlook sets out three scenarios that look ahead to 2035: a Current Policies Scenario, which assumes no change on policies as at mid-2010; a New Policies Scenario, which takes account of recently announced pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies (which are “assumed to be implemented in a relatively cautious manner, reflecting their non-binding character”); and a 450 Scenario, which sets out an energy pathway consistent with 2 degrees.
– In the New Policies Scenario, energy demand rises 36% from 2008 to 2035 – that’s 1.2% a year on average, compared to 2% a year over the previous 27 years and 1.4% in the Current Policies Scenario. In the 450 scenario, by contrast, demand rises by only 0.7% a year.
– For the first time, the WEO has a whole section on peak oil, which notes that in the New Policies Scenario, “crude oil reaches an undulating plateau of 68-69 mb/d by 2020, but never regains its all-time high of 70 mb/d reached in 2006”. But they also note that “production of natural gas liquids and unconventional oil grows strongly”. Their conclusion: “clearly, global oil production will peak one day, but that peak will be determined by factors affecting both demand and supply”. See here for what the peak oilers have to say about all this. Remember that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with unconventional oil are far higher than for conventional.
– Lots of discussion about natural gas, with the phrase “golden age” getting a look-in. Key take-away: “the glut of global gas-supply capacity that has emerged as a result of the economic crisis (which depressed has demand), the boom in US unconventional gas production and a surge in liquefied natural gas (LNG) capacity, could persist for longer than many expect”. The glut was 130bcm in 2009 – next year, it will rise to 200bcm before starting to decline again.
– Biofuels are expected to expand rapidly – from 1 mb/d today to 4.4 mb/d in 2035 under the New Policies Scenario. Advanced biofuels aren’t expected to enter the market until around 2020. Total government support for biofuels came to $20 billion in 2009, mostly in the US and EU; between 2010 and 2020, that’s expected to rise to about $45 billion a year. Hard to find much to cheer about on the food security front here.
– Copenhagen was a “step forward” [like every other weak climate summit ever] but still “fell a very long way short of what is required to set us on a path to a sustainable energy system”. 2 degrees C isn’t definitively out of reach – yet – but the weak summit outcome means that much stronger efforts, costing considerably more, will be needed after 2020″, and “the speed of the energy transformation that would need to occur after 2020 is such as to raise serious misgivings about the practical achievability of cutting emissions sufficiently”.
Limiting warming to 2 degrees is “all but impossible” under the New Policies Scenario, in which emissions rise to 34 gigatonnes in 2020 and 35 Gt in 2035, from 29 Gt in 2008 – an increase of 21% by 2020, all of which is accounted for by non-OECD countries. Instead, we put ourselves on track for stabilisation at over 650 ppm of CO2e, and a likely temperature rise of over 3.5 degrees C. So what would a scenario look like in which we don’t screw ourselves? Answer after the jump.
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by Alex Evans | Nov 14, 2010 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbb7g1HT0YA[/youtube]
by Richard Gowan | Nov 12, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, UK
When I was small, I was taken to London’s Imperial War Museum (above) and I had a good time. With the EU and NATO lowering their military ambitions, I’m starting to wonder if we shouldn’t set up some sort of Post-Imperial War Museum to explain our recent military adventures to future generations, as I muse in Canada’s The Mark:
Readers of serious European newspapers – admittedly a dwindling breed – should know where to find Kabul, Kandahar, and Kunduz on a map. NATO’s fight against the Taliban has given us a passable knowledge of Afghanistan’s major towns and cities.
But what about Bunia and Goz Beïda? Asked to identify these places, many Europeans might guess they could be found in the Star Wars universe. But they are real – located in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and eastern Chad, respectively – and they feature significantly in the recent military history of Europe.
In 2003, French troops were deployed to Bunia under the European Union’s flag of Congo to fend off militias. In 2008, Irish troops were flying the EU flag in Goz Beïda, tasked with protecting supplies to refugees from Darfur. A Chadian rebel group attacked. The Irish escaped with no casualties, although some aid workers complained that the soldiers failed to fight back.
If anyone ever builds an EU War Museum to rival the Imperial War Museum in London, it will include displays on these engagements. But museum guides may have to explain that, after the Chad mission ended in 2009, EU soldiers never returned to Africa.
Read the rest of the article to find out why. In the meantime, readers are invited to suggest items that should be on display in my EU War Museum. I’d certainly want to include some of these Action Man-style uniforms, apparently worn by Belgian Special Forces (yes, they really do exist) that deployed to Chad…
by Richard Gowan | Nov 12, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, UK
The European Council on Foreign Relations has a new blog. I’ll be contributing to it occasionally while maintaining my undying loyalty to Global Dashboard too. In the meantime, check out other ECFR authors on:
Add it to your blogroll right away!
by Alex Evans | Nov 11, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global Dashboard, Global system
Back in 2007, Martin Wolf wrote an opinion piece in the FT in which he noted that,
“…the biggest point about debates on climate change and energy supply is that they bring back the question of limits. This is why climate change and energy security are such geopolitically significant issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge – indeed, they are already emerging – within and among countries.”
Wolf might equally have mentioned other resource scarcity factors such as competition for land, water scarcity and global food security, where similar worries and questions apply. But is he right that the issue of limits necessarily leads to a world of zero-sum games, resource nationalism and intensifying competition for dwindling resources? And if that outcome isn’t set in stone, then what kinds of multilateral action are needed in order to prevent it?
These are the questions at the heart of a new Center on International Cooperation report of mine out today, entitled Globalization and Scarcity. It tries to avoid falling into the usual trap of playing ‘fantasy multilateralism’ – imagining what a perfect international organogram for managing these issues would look like, which countries would sit on which new decision-making bodies, whether a new World Environment Organisation is needed and so on – and instead takes a much more functional approach that starts by asking: what is it that we actually need the international system to do in order to manage an age of growing scarcity?
With this framing in mind, the report looks at four key areas for action: development and fragile states; finance and investment; international trade; and strategic resource competition between states. In each case, it sets out where global (as opposed to regional, national or local) action is needed, and then identifies a range of actions needed in order to manage scarcity, grouping them into those that could be undertaken in the next year or two; those that will require greater political heavy lifting, and consequently need more time; and various underlying questions and issues that will need to be resolved along the way.
The report also marks the first published output of CIC’s program on Resource Scarcity, Climate Change and Multilateralism, which David and I are both heavily involved in – do visit the program’s homepage on CIC’s website, or this summary of what we’ll be looking at and who’s on the Steering Group.
