New energy agency chief sees household energy use rising in industrial countries

BERLIN: Despite the growing political commitment to tackling global warming, individual energy use and carbon emissions in the leading industrial countries have actually increased in recent years, the new head of a major energy advisory group said Monday.

Nobuo Tanaka, the first non-European chosen to lead the International Energy Agency, said during an interview that Europe, Canada, Australia and particularly the United States had to do much more to increase energy efficiency if they wanted to have any credibility when calling on India and China to act.
“The leading industrial countries are not on a path to sustainable energy future,” said Tanaka, a Japanese economist and diplomat who became the IEA’s executive director Sept. 1.

“There was a big effort to increase efficiency during the 1980s because of the oil price shocks,” he said. “But these efforts subsided over the 1990s.”

The statistics were released in Berlin as energy and environmental ministers from 20 countries met to prepare for the United Nations climate talks in Bali, Indonesia, in December. They should shift some of the spotlight away from India and China, which along with the United States are among the world’s biggest producers of CO2 emissions.

International Herald Tribune