Unfortunately, the energy landscape has changed fundamentally since the 1970s. Reserve supplies are tighter in all segments, from electric supply to refining, making the system more fragile. Resources are more concentrated, with close to two thirds of remaining oil reserves in the Middle East and the majority of natural-gas reserves split among three countries: Russia, Iran and Qatar. (Natural gas was not part of the energy picture in the ’70s.) China and India are now major consuming nations. Most important, global warming has changed forever the way we must approach energy crises.
The world is faced with a truly global climate threat at a time when our systems for dealing with it are less and less effective. Power everywhere is moving from the center to the periphery. Within nations, vertical command-and-control structures are eroding. It’s increasingly difficult for multilateral organizations to take powerful collective action. Witness our collective impotence in the face of rogue and failed states, the collapse of world-trade talks, the crisis in Darfur.
If we really want to draw lessons from the 1970s, they should be in reference not to the oil shocks but to a far more fundamental threat. The risk of global warming is, arguably, comparable to nuclear war in terms of its potential to destroy the planet. During the cold war we didn’t ask our leaders to prepare for the cleanup after Armageddon, or the trials of living in nuclear winter. We asked them to act so the war would not happen. Whatever stand we took on the arms race, the need for collective action to stop nuclear war was understood by all.
One difference now is that the international organizations that once helped to frame collective action, like NATO or the United Nations, can no longer do the job. What’s needed are new, multidimensional institutions that can bring together the wide range of groups, nations, corporations and individuals necessary to tackle our problems. If there is a positive in the current energy crisis, it is that it could “midwife” the kind of institutions that can manage our new global interdependence. Global warming demands a new system of global governance that takes account of how our world has changed since the 1970s. And how energy has become a survival issue.
