Andrew McKillop: COP15 in Copenhagen … a failure for globalization!

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…Fending off the near-term impacts of Peak Oil by slowing energy demand growth, while profiting from the coming global bulge in cheap gas supplies, was yet another, of course never admitted, but appealing strand to forcing the pace on global energy transition. Deep in the Herd Memory of today’s oil importing OECD country leaders, lies the spectre of the 1970s Oil Shocks, well hidden by the public message that energy transition will “prevent climate catastrophe.” Both the “non-hydro renewables” like solar and wind power, and cheap natural gas supplies offer new ways to obtain energy security and continue increasing energy consumption.

● The so-called climate catastrophe is projected for a very flexible period ahead, ‘maturing’ around 2075 or later, but peak oil and expensive, geopolitically unsure energy supplies are past, present and near term future realities.

The spectre of runaway global warming “burning the planet,” much utilized by the European triumvirate, has had little uptake by emerging economy leaders specially due to the present and near-term future challenges facing these economies, and the low income developing countries, formerly called ‘the South’ or ‘the LDC.’

All are embarked in their real world, real economy urban industrial transition — exactly the same that was called the ‘economic miracle of post-war reconstruction’ in most OECD countries, through the period of 1950-1975. In this period, several G8 countries including Germany, Japan, France and Italy regularly increased their oil burn at 7% a year and achieved 5% a year growth of their economies. Today, China and India, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan and others are doing the same thing, or better, in a process named ‘Asian de-coupling.’

This decoupling has an energy price: high and rising fossil energy intensity of economic growth, and fast growth of energy demand and imported fuels. To be sure, oil costs more today than its derisory, giveaway price in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s — or in the 1985-2000 cheap oil interval — but no handy alternative yet exists for powering conventional economic growth. As proven through 2004-2008, the emerging economies had considerably less economic problems absorbing the impact of ever rising oil prices, which peaked at around US$145 a barrel in 2008,than the much higher income OECD economies — due to the real energy productivity of the lower energy/lower income economies.

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