Leaked plan: G8 Seeks to Promote ”Trillions” of Dollars of Investment in FF

Energy Security is one of three core themes scheduled for discussion at the upcoming Saint-Petersburg Summit and it will presumably be the core issue on the table when G8 Energy Ministers meet on March 15th and 16th in Moscow. Rather than use the G8 process as a means to overcome the world’s addiction to oil and other fossil fuels, a G8 draft Plan of Action on Global Energy Security reveals that the Saint-Petersburg Summit is shaping up as an opportunity to ensure that the addiction will be well fed in the decades to come.

The G8 draft Plan of Action argues that 17 trillion US dollars of investment will be needed over the next 25 years in order to create a “shock-proof system of global energy supply” and it outlines the G8’s intention to work together to “create the environment for the effective mobilization of these huge sums.” The G8 is calling for a global effort to reshape regulatory regimes and remove “unjustified administrative barriers”. According to the draft Plan of Action, these legal and regulatory changes will help create the conditions for the private sector to:

..The world’s leading industrialized countries don’t seem to be able to decide whether or not to use the G8 as a vehicle for overcoming their addiction to oil or as a means of feeding that addiction. They acknowledge the potential for “devastating conflicts driven by eventually disruptive competition for energy sources”, but their draft Plan of Action seems to suggest that the answer to the world’s dangerous dependence on fossil fuels is more fossil fuels. Rather than charting a bold vision for a clean energy future, G8 governments are debating a “global energy architecture” that would drive us further down the destructive road that we find ourselves on today. Hopefully there is still time to turn the Summit around.

Energy Bulletin