The Hindu Business Line : Lacking energy

Although it is depressing for the world economy, the sharp $11 increase in oil prices last Friday, to touch $138.54 a barrel, could not have come at a better time as far as the international effort to control the demand for energy from fossil fuels is concerned. The Energy Ministers of the Group of Eight countries along with officials from India, China and South Korea, when they met in Aomori in Japan over the weekend, could not have been oblivious to this development, wh ich may have injected a little more urgency into the deliberations than planned.

Even so, the outcome of the meeting was disappointing in that it lacked any detailed involvement by the developed economies in the global effort to cut down on energy use. While the crux of the joint statement issued after the meeting was the resolve on the part of the participating countries to put more money into the effort to increase energy efficiency and develop “green technologies” — with special interest shown by the rich in “carbon capture and storage” schemes — no specific funds were pledged to back up the gesture. Indeed, this is not surprising because the entire debate on the success, or the lack of it, of the Kyoto Protocol and the post-Kyoto framework, now in the works, has been mired in the issue of funding the technological upgradation needed to attain the “clean energy” objective. This being the backdrop, and with exploding crude prices, it would have been so much more welcome if the G-8 economies had used the Aomori meeting to commit specific investment figures, which would have represented a major advance in the world’s efforts to battle the impending energy crisis. There was also an absence of agreement on the role nuclear energy can play in the energy scenario. While the International Energy Agency, in a recent report, has said that nuclear power generation should be stepped up exponentially to increase energy availability and promote the “clean energy” concept, the G-8 economies are still dragging their feet on the issue, with such members as Germany sticking to their earlier stand against building nuclear power plants.

For countries such as India and China, the only “solution” to the current energy problem is to improve efficiency in utilisation, which could moderate somewhat the growth in demand. Admittedly, these emerging economies lack the financial muscle of their developed counterparts to introduce more up-to-date technologies on the scale required, which would sustain economic growth while controlling energy use. As the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, has urged, appreciable savings in energy use can be achieved by a heightened conservation awareness on the part of major energy users. Indeed, there appears to be little choice but to make such an approach integral to the strategy for economic growth till such time dependence of fossil-fuels can be effectively reduced with the help of better technology on an extended scale.

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