The peculiar politics of energy.
Florini, Ann
Imagine that you could wave a magic wand and provide everyone in
the world with easy access to clean and affordable energy. In one stroke
you would make the world a far cleaner, richer, fairer, and safer place.
Suddenly, a billion and a half of the world's poorest people could
discover what it is like to turn on an electric light in the evening.
The looming threat posed by climate change would largely disappear. From
the South China Sea to the Middle East to the Arctic, geopolitical
tensions over energy resources would fade away. Human health would
benefit, too, as vaccines and perishable foods could be refrigerated the
world over. And many of the world's most corrupt government
officials could no longer enrich themselves by bleeding their countries
dry of revenues from fossil fuel sales.
It may seem implausible that improving the performance of a single
sector of the global economy could by itself have such extraordinary
benefits, until we consider how central the energy sector is to the
global economy. Energy is the means by which all else happens. The
Industrial Revolution was, in essence, a transformation from economic
systems reliant on human and animal power to ones based on far more
concentrated forms of power. As the Nobel economics laureate E. F.
Schumacher noted, energy as we understand it today is "not just
another commodity, but the precondition of all commodities, a basic
factor equal with air, water, and earth." (1)
This centrality makes the provision of energy services a matter of
basic distributional justice, which the world is failing to achieve. And
the dysfunctional means by which energy services are currently provided
raise a host of additional ethical dilemmas, imposing heavy
environmental and social costs on those who benefit least from such
energy services and who are least able to cope with such costs.
There is nothing inevitable about the current situation. It would
not be technologically impossible to transform the energy sector into
one that does a much better job of meeting energy needs without imposing
such great costs. A plethora of An extraordinary array of the
world's most pressing problems flow from the current entrenched and
dysfunctional energy system. Governments, businesses, and citizens alike
tend to focus on the short-term imperative: to get enough energy supply,
now, to keep our highly fossil fuel-dependent economies functioning and
growing. This goal is generally referred to as "energy
security," defined as reliable and affordable access to energy
supplies. Such a goal does not begin to address the environmental and
distributional issues. But even if energy security, defined in these
narrow terms, were the sole appropriate goal, the current global energy
system creates major problems for both military security and economic
prosperity.
Fossil fuel sources, particularly oil, are not equitably
distributed around the globe. Oil in particular is concentrated in a
relatively small number of countries, many of which are considered
unstable and most of which control their oil exports via state-owned
companies. Oil still accounts for roughly a third of the primary energy
supply worldwide, and transportation systems everywhere remain
overwhelmingly dependent on petroleum-based fuels. It is also,
importantly, the forms fossil fuels into useable power. That
infrastructure is highly centralized, tightly coupled, and easily
disrupted by causes both innocent and malign. (6) As leading energy
analyst Daniel Yergin warned more than fifteen years ago in discussing
this infrastructure's vulnerability to deliberate attack,
In the United States alone, there are more than 140 refineries,
4,000 offshore platforms, 160,000 miles of oil pipelines,
facilities to handle 15 million barrels of oil a day of imports and
exports, 10,400 power plants, 160,000 miles of high-voltage
electric power transmission lines, and 1.4 million miles of natural
gas pipelines. None of the world's complex, integrated supply
chains were built with security ... in mind .... The challenge of
energy security will grow more urgent in the years ahead, because
the scale of the global trade in energy will grow substantially as
world markets become more integrated. Currently, every day some 40
million barrels of oil cross oceans on tankers. (7)
A third threat to this traditional notion of energy security comes
from oil's rising and extraordinarily volatile price. It is the
energy commodity most traded across borders and is often the benchmark
for natural gas prices (although recent growth in available natural gas
resources, particularly in the United States, is attenuating that link).
The high oil prices of the past decade largely reflect structural
changes in the global economy that portend long-term increasing demand
coupled with the likelihood of more expensive sources of supply. Global
demand has grown sharply as the emerging market economies continue to
follow fossil fuel-based models of economic growth. On the supply side
is the unpleasant fact that the world has already extracted and burned a
large share of the oil that is easily and therefore cheaply extracted.
What is left lies offshore (often deeply offshore), exists in the form
of tar sands, or for other reasons is much more expensive to access than
the conventional oil sources that fueled the twentieth century.
Price volatility reflects not only the ups and downs of economic
demand but also the unpredictability of a large number of major
producers, among them Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and Venezuela. That
volatility threatens energy security not just in the short term when
prices peak and make energy less affordable, but also over the longer
run. Oil prices ranged from $30 to over $140 a barrel in the past
decade. Such sharp swings make planning for future energy supplies very
difficult. Investments aimed at developing energy supplies, whether
fossil-based or renewable, generally require long-term planning that
must take into account projections of future oil prices. Efforts to
develop commercially competitive alternatives to oil may make sense if
the price of oil is projected to be above a threshold amount, but not
otherwise. This is what makes questions of fossil-fuel supply security
directly relevant to the development of renewable energy
alternatives--that is, investors demand a reasonable degree of
predictability regarding the high price of fossil fuels before they are
willing to risk their money on "green" alternatives.
In short, energy security, in its conventional meaning of
affordable and reliable access to energy supplies, is not provided
effectively by the existing global energy system. And it has long since
been clear that this conventional definition is inadequate, as it fails
to include a third key component: the sustainability of that access. An
energy system that warms, cools, lights, and transports us in the short
term but threatens to massively disrupt human civilization in the
slightly longer term is not a system that can be considered secure. Some
two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global
climate change come from energy, via the burning of fossil fuels that
releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. To date, despite numerous
promises and pledges, there is little sign of large-scale, intensive
efforts to decarbonize the energy sector in the ways needed to prevent
global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius--a figure widely agreed to
be the maximum safe level of warming above the preindustrial global
temperature. As the well-regarded International Energy Agency (IEA) has
been saying with increasing desperation in its annual World Energy
Outlook, we have already committed ourselves to almost all of that
warming. Power plants and factories last a long time, and existing
facilities already ensure that emissions will reach at least 80 percent
of the total that risks bringing about a 2 degree rise. In 2011 the IEA
warned that planned construction in the next five years will cause us to
cross this threshold unless those new facilities are switched to
low-carbon technologies--something that does not appear to be part of
most countries' plans. (8)
As a recent article in New Scientist pithily summarized:
The reality is that the 2 degree Celsius target is technically and
economically feasible, but politically impossible. Saleem ul Huq of
the International Institute for Environment and Development says
that countries would have to go to a war footing to do it. He
compares the situation to the Second World War, when nations like
the U.K. transformed their economies to deal with an overwhelming
threat. This single-minded commitment can work miracles, but no
country has any such plans. (9)
Although fossil fuel proponents often argue that we cannot
decarbonize quickly because the world's poor deserve the relatively
cheap energy services that the rich already enjoy, the current global
energy system actually fails to reach the poorest of the poor. Economic
poverty is frequently due to and/or indistinguishable from energy
poverty--that is, the lack of access to modern power sources. The 1.4
billion people who rank as the world's most destitute cannot access
electricity from any source. This means that they cannot do something as
simple as carry out chores that require vision once the sun goes down.
An even larger number, some 2.4 billion, cook and heat their homes with
traditional, dirty forms of "biomass" fuels, severely
threatening their health. Indeed, the particulates from such indoor
burning kill an estimated 2.5 million people a year. (10) Finding a way
to provide energy access for the poor without exacerbating the
environmental crisis (from which the poor suffer disproportionately) is
one of the great challenges of our times.
The modern energy system is a dirty business in the metaphorical as
well as the literal sense. The correlation between oil wealth and bad
government is so strong that it has become known as the "resource
curse": when oil revenues flood in, few government officials fully
resist the temptation to pocket the cash rather than invest the proceeds
in their countries. Multinational corporations risk becoming complicit
when they contract with governments in these countries. The extractive
industries obviously must go to where the resources are located, and
they are sometimes accused of colluding with corrupt officials.
Transparency International's "Bribe Payer's Index"
has ranked the oil and gas sector as the fourth worst sector (out of
nineteen) for bribing public officials. (11) Moreover, extractive
industries such as oil are frequently accused of complicity in gross
human rights abuses. (12)
THE CAUSES
Humanity did not set out to create an energy system with such
flaws. The system exists in its current form as the result of a huge
array of largely uncoordinated choices made over the past century and a
half, most of them made with the very good short-term result of
demonstrably improving the quality of life. Life with the kinds of
services made possible by modern energy is clearly much better than life
without them. The benefits are immediate and widespread. The costs have
only slowly become apparent.
But apparent those costs have indeed become, leading to a great
deal of talk about the need for an energy "transition" from
carbon-intensive, dirty, insecure energy sources provided through
vulnerable centralized systems to cleaner, safer, and more secure ones.
That talk, however, has yet to be met by action on any significant
scale. Why is something that is so desirable not happening--or at least
not happening much faster? Is it in fact possible to have the benefits
of modern energy services without such high costs? Is energy justice
even within our grasp?
The short answer is: yes. But it is important to acknowledge that
no known or readily foreseeable energy technology will be free of all
social and environmental costs. The initial excitement over
carbon-neutral biofuels (crops that absorb carbon dioxide while growing,
then release it when they are burned for energy) has given way to
concerns about deforestation when land is cleared for those crops and
about their competition with food crops needed to feed the world's
growing population. Nuclear energy's twin dilemmas of proliferation
risks and potential environmental damage are well known.
Hydropower's large dams displace large numbers of people and can
wreak havoc on local environments. Even the apparently greenest energy
sources are not perfect. Solar photovoltaic cells and the batteries
needed to store their energy both contain toxic materials. Wind turbines
are often produced by non-green processes.
But although the magic wand to create clean and affordable energy
may not exist, existing and near-term technologies to move the world
much further toward a sane energy system certainly do. The International
Energy Agency's biennial Energy Technology Perspectives lays out
scenarios and road maps for necessary policy changes and plausible
technological developments that could bring about very substantial
progress. (13) Numerous scholarly and policy publications show that a
wide range of reasonable technological options in fact exists. (14) And,
as will be discussed below, some quite important efforts are indeed
under way to deploy existing technological alternatives and to develop
new ones. However, these steps are nowhere near adequate to deal with
the range of security, environmental, and social issues outlined above.
Why are we not seeing a more rapid transition? The world's
energy system is in many ways counterproductive because of the way
energy is governed. The rules for producing, processing, transporting,
and deploying energy sources have grown up piecemeal around individual
fuel sources, not in a rational process about how to provide energy
services. At both the national and the international level, energy
governance is badly flawed.
There are two types of problems with energy governance at the
national level. First, almost no country has a coherent and sensible
energy policy implemented by a well-designed set of institutions.
Instead, there are such situations as that in India, which has five
distinct energy ministries divided up by fuel sources. Thus, there is a
coal ministry, a renewables ministry, and so on--but no institutionally
effective system to produce a coherent overall energy policy. (15)
Dividing up energy governance by fuel source in such ways makes little
sense. No country needs any particular fuel source--it needs energy
services--and as long as the services are provided without undue costs,
there is no rational basis for preferring one source to another. The
standard practice of focusing on particular fuel sources creates
bureaucratic turf wars that make coherent energy policy all but
impossible.
Other countries do have energy ministries or other central bodies
whose role should be to create coherence, but they rarely have the
necessary institutional clout. China, now the world's largest
energy consumer, (16) has a coordinating body--not even at the level of
a ministry--that lacks the bureaucratic power and resources to rein in
other parts of the government or the state-owned enterprises that are
setting up energy deals around the world. (17) In the United States, the
Department of Energy is currently headed by people with a strong
progressive vision as to the direction in which U.S. energy policy ought
to go, and they are having some degree of success. But that success is
sharply constrained by the nature of the American political system,
which has allowed vested interests in various traditional energy
industries to hold sway, and which is preventing serious attention from
being given to the country's aging and dilapidated energy
infrastructure. In these and other cases, the multifaceted policy
domains of energy--from securing sea lanes for oil shipments to
providing clean energy to destitute villagers--are addressed, if at all,
in separate bureaucratic silos.
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
Things are no better at the international level, where a great deal
of cross-border rule making is needed but is not occurring. Traditional
energy security based on fossil fuels requires that international oil
and natural gas markets--and, increasingly, coal markets--function
reliably, but these markets are notorious for their opacity.
International trade rules and policy need clearly to forbid subsidies to
the wrong kinds of energy systems and simultaneously promote any needed
subsidies to the right kind. (18) Transitioning to a low-carbon energy
future will require massive investments in the development and
widespread deployment of new technologies and their associated
infrastructure, a feat that will necessarily involve new partnerships
across financial actors in many countries. Internationally, there is no
overarching framework within which key actors regularly come together to
talk about the full range of priorities, and little effective discussion
about how to transition to a more desirable and sustainable energy
future. The existing global energy governance framework is, not
coincidentally, just as fragmented and incoherent as the national
governance systems upon which it rests.
The term "global governance" often has people immediately
thinking about a "global governor" or even a "global
government"--a single organization tasked with setting and
enforcing the rules. No such entity exists for most issues on the
international agenda, and one certainly does not exist for energy. The
International Energy Agency is the closest the world currently comes to
a comprehensive energy organization, but it is far from being an energy
agency for the world. (19) The IEA was set up in 1974 by what were then
the world's major oil-consuming countries in North America and
Europe, and by Japan, under the auspices of the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. Essentially, it was the
response of oil-consuming countries to the price hikes imposed by the
newly invigorated producers' cartel, the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC). (20)
Under the terms of the treaty that established the IEA, its member
countries all agreed to create oil stockpiles equivalent to sixty days
(later raised to ninety days) of net oil imports that could be drawn
upon in case of disruptions to global oil supplies. The agency's
initial purpose was to coordinate its members' actions in drawing
on those stockpiles, a task that the agency has continued to fulfill as
recently as 2011 in response to the conflict in Libya. However, the
founding agreement also called on the agency to play a broader set of
roles, which have also been expanded over time to make the IEA the
world's leading source of energy statistics, a key interlocutor on
energy policy and technology options, and one of the few places in the
international system where any effort is made to think systematically
about how to achieve the goals of the competing priorities for global
energy governance.
As of 2012, the IEA has found itself in a somewhat peculiar
position. Although known for its technical competence in a wide range of
energy issues, it remains a tiny agency, with a staff of less than 250.
Shifts in oil consumption (and particularly the rise of China and India
as consumers) mean that a very large percentage of consumption is now
happening in countries that are not part of the IEA system of managed
stockpiles and that have shown little inclination to join. Although the
agency, starting in 2005, has become the most important source of
expertise on climate change for the G-8, the G-8 has largely been
superseded by the G-20, whose membership overlaps much less with that of
the IEA. All this leaves the IEA as a key actor in global energy
governance, but one with a somewhat uncertain future.
In terms of managing global oil trade, one obvious approach would
be for the producing and consuming nations to get together and agree on
at least some arrangement for increasing transparency and for
stabilizing prices. Volatile prices are as disruptive for producers as
they are for consumers. The existence of a producers' organization
and a consumers' organization--OPEC and the IEA--would seem to make
it relatively straightforward for the two sets of countries to deal with
each other. But of course nothing in global politics is straightforward.
For the first two decades of the IEA's existence (OPEC was
established a decade earlier), the two organizations did not interact.
That changed, however, in the early 1990s. After the 1991 Gulf War, the
IEA brought together technical experts from both importing and exporting
countries in a series of conferences. These conferences evolved into the
International Energy Forum (IEF), a biennial meeting of energy ministers
that became an organization with a secretariat based in Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia, and a membership that extends well beyond the memberships of the
IEA and OPEC. The IEF has not, clearly, solved the problem of oil price
volatility, although it has made a bit of progress toward increasing the
transparency of the oil sector via the Joint Oil Data Initiative.
The IEF is just one attempt out of a large and growing number to
close some of the gaps in global energy governance. Another such attempt
is the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), which was
established in 20ll (largely at German instigation) to bring together
the world's governments and many other stakeholders in support of
renewable energy. IRENA is one of the very few formal intergovernmental
organizations to be created in recent decades. As of 2012, some
ninety-two governments (plus the European Union) are members, with
another sixty-five on their way in, making IRENA far more representative
of the international community than the twenty-eight-member IEA. (21)
But IRENA is new, untested, and small--its 2012 Work Programme proposes
a budget of just $28.4 million and a total staff of seventy-two. (22)
Other initiatives aim to push large users of energy services to
behave differently, and to demand cleaner and more sustainable forms of
energy, often through innovative uses of disclosure and transparency.
(23) The Carbon Disclosure Project, for example, has brought together
several hundred large institutional investors to query companies on
their carbon emissions in an attempt to push them to pay attention to,
and reduce, those emissions. The Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA)
program of the Center for Global Development focuses on estimated carbon
emissions from power plants around the world, publishing those estimates
in a database that ranks the facilities by their emission levels. Stock
markets are increasingly asking, and in some cases requiring, companies
that list with them to report on their social and environmental impacts.
While all of these initiatives are in relatively early stages and must
overcome serious methodological difficulties related to acquiring and
reporting the relevant information, their growing prominence indicates
that disclosure-based governance systems are likely to be a significant
part of the strategy for improving global energy governance.
The desire to reduce corruption in the energy system has also
spawned numerous experiments in global governance. The Extractive
Industries Transparency
Initiative (EITI), for example, grew out of a British proposal at
the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South
Africa, that both the extractive industries and governments should
publicly disclose audited statements of the payments these firms make to
governments. The EITI is up and running, although there is much debate
about its efficacy. (24) The United States and the United Kingdom have
both taken unilateral steps aimed at increasing transparency in the
sector to counter corruption, and the European Union is considering
similar rules. (25) Recent years have also seen increased attention to
the need to extend energy services more equitably so that they reach the
poorest of the poor. The United Nations General Assembly has designated
2012 as the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All, (26) a
step intended "to raise awareness about the importance of
increasing sustainable access to energy, energy efficiency, and
renewable energy at the local, national, regional and international
levels." (27) All of this adds up to small-scale and piecemeal
approaches. In short, the current system of global energy governance is
a mess, with many actors, many priorities, little coherence, and limited
effectiveness. The fitful progress seen to date demonstrates the
feebleness of the governing institutions and the strength of vested
interests and entrenched habits. But that progress, however fitful it
may be, does at least provide a basis for moving forward. To look for
ways to accelerate the energy transition, one promising approach is to
obey the journalists' rule of thumb: follow the money.
POINTS OF LEVERAGE
The IEA now estimates that the world will need to invest $26
trillion simply to meet market demand for energy out to 2030, and these
estimates keep rising as global energy demand continues to rise.
Notably, these figures do not take into account the steps needed to
shift to low-carbon energy--which the IEA thinks will require an
additional $10 trillion--or the additional energy infrastructure needed
to bring energy services to the world's poor. Given that global
gross domestic product in 2011 was roughly $70 trillion, energy
investments will clearly continue to be a very significant share of
global economic activity. (28) Deciding where that money may come from
and what energy systems to invest in provides policymakers with
potentially enormous points of leverage to change the direction of the
global energy system.
National governments will clearly play key roles in directing such
new energy investment within their own countries, and they have many
tools available to channel investments in socially desirable directions.
They can act directly via tax provisions, regulations requiring or
forbidding certain behaviors, and subsidies (which currently primarily
support fossil fuels and nuclear power, although there is some subsidy
of green energy as well); they can set rules around "inward"
investment, setting standards for the foreign investments that will be
allowed in their countries; they can structure their electric utility
sectors and set rules for power purchase agreements. All these actions
already occur to some degree, but not necessarily with either the
intention or the result of constituting a coherent, rational set of
policies aimed at bringing about a coherent and rational energy
transition.
Much of the money, however, will cross national borders, and thus
we must think about global as well as national points of leverage.
Sources of capital in one part of the world invest in energy services
and energy supplies in other parts of the world. If large quantities of
cross-border finance need to be raised for energy, that provides an
excellent opportunity to think about how to invest those funds
intelligently, rather than simply to build on the systems that are
already in place. This draws our attention to a number of actors not
usually thought of as "global governors": the funders,
investors, and government regulators who shape how this money gets
invested.
Funding for energy projects is shaped by both public sector
entities and through a host of private actors. (29) On the public side,
the most important actors are the export credit agencies of national
governments and the intergovernmental multilateral development banks,
such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
Export credit agencies (ECAs) are potentially among the best points
of leverage for shifting energy investments in new directions. (30) The
job of a national export credit agency is to help companies from that
country to invest or export abroad. Investors tend to be nervous about
such long-term projects as oil fields or coal mines, with their high
up-front costs (particularly in relatively unstable or unpredictable
countries), without some means of at least partially recouping their
expenses should something go wrong. An export credit agency helps to
provide such a guarantee. Most major economies have export credit
agencies as mechanisms for supporting their national business
communities. But the rules by which these agencies act do not take into
account larger questions of the long-term public interest, particularly
in the energy realm, where the definition of that long-term public
interest is not widely agreed upon. Export credit agencies support
massive cross-border investment flows for energy projects, but few make
much effort to ensure that those investments are sustainable in any
sense other than the short-term economic one. There is no inherent
reason, however, why export credit agencies could not apply such
guidelines as to the types of energy projects they will support.
The multilateral development banks loan money to member governments
for a wide variety of purposes, including the development of energy
sources ranging from coal plants to hydropower dams. (31) But the banks,
whose members include both rich and poor countries, find themselves
caught between the competing priorities of those member governments. The
World Bank, for example, is under pressure from the rich country
governments, particularly the Europeans, to support the transition to a
low-carbon energy system. Other member governments, including China and
India, are pressing hard for project loans to support more traditional
energy resources so that they can quickly meet their rapidly escalating
domestic energy needs. These countries are primarily concerned with
providing energy for economic growth and with ending energy poverty.
They argue that such issues as climate change are the responsibility of
the rich countries that developed-and continue to sustain--their
economies by merrily burning massive quantities of fossil fuel. And,
unfortunately, the easiest and cheapest source of energy in many
developing countries, including both China and India, is coal--the
dirtiest of such fuels. As a result, the World Bank is simultaneously
supporting large fossil fuel projects in many parts of the world while
also trying to pressure the recipients of its loans to focus on clean
energy sources. By and large, most energy loans from the multilateral
development banks still overwhelmingly favor fossil fuels.
Nonetheless, the World Bank has had some positive influence on the
rules that influence large-scale private lending. In June 2003, ten of
the world's largest private banks launched a set of operational
standards known as the Equator Principles, which are voluntary standards
for project financing to manage the environmental and social impacts of
loans to large development projects. The Equator Principles are based on
the Safeguard Policies developed at the International Finance
Corporation, the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank.
In addition to these established agencies, a number of new
partnerships have emerged in recent years to push the global energy
system in a different direction. For example, some groups of governments
are making progress on cross-border coordination around clean energy.
The annual Clean Energy Ministerial, first convened in 2010 at U.S.
instigation, has brought together not only energy ministers that aim to
fill them. One possible approach to filling those gaps is to look at
other global governance arenas to see whether energy-related issues can
be addressed there. Trade would seem an obvious candidate, but to date
there are few trade-related energy rules that can help to resolve energy
conundrums. The Doha Round of trade negotiations did include talks on
energy services, but the Doha Round has died and is unlikely to be
resurrected anytime soon. Many countries have recently joined, or are
about to join, the World Trade Organization, and thus will be subject to
WTO trade rules. These new members include a large number of major
energy exporters, whose possibly WTO-illegal quantitative restrictions
on energy exports may now become an issue. WTO rules also affect what
subsidies member countries can apply to their industries, raising
questions about whether "perverse" subsidies that support
fossil fuels may come under fire, but also whether subsidies to green
energy ventures may be affected. Given the lack of progress on global
climate negotiations, the European Union is looking at the potential use
of trade barriers against countries that fail to adopt effective climate
policies, which could set the stage for a reverse the massive
degradation of the planet's ecosystems, mobilize tens of trillions
of dollars in new investments, and channel those investments in the
right direction.
As daunting as that agenda undoubtedly is, it is not hopeless.
There are many points of leverage that could be used to push energy
policy in new directions. Governments could require their export credit
agencies to develop more stringent standards concerning the types of
energy investments they will support, or the export credit agencies
could agree on new standards themselves. Investors, many of whom have
already supported such undertakings as the Carbon Disclosure Project,
could push the business community much harder to drastically reduce
energy consumption. Leading businesses, in turn, could use their
leverage with governments to push for stricter global standards. And
individuals could do a great deal of good by demanding--and paying
for--green energy options from their utilities and energy-efficient
products from businesses, as well as by voting for leaders prepared to
move the world onto an energy path that serves the public good.
doi: 10.1017/So892679412000433
NOTES
(1) Geoffrey Kirk, Schumacher on Energy: Speeches and Writings of
E. F. Schumacher (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), cited in Benjamin K.
Sovacool and Marilyn A. Brown, "Introduction: The Compelling Tangle
of Energy and American Society," in Benjamin K. Sovacool and
Marilyn A. Brown, eds., Energy and American Society--Thirteen Myths
(Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer, 2007), p. 1.
(2) See, e.g., International Energy Agency, "Tracking Clean
Energy Progress: Energy Technology Perspectives 2012 Excerpt as IEA
Input to the Clean Energy Ministerial"; www.iea.org/publications/
freepublications/publication/Tracking_Clean_Energy_Progress.pdf.
(3) For a detailed analysis of the objectives of global energy
governance, see Navroz K. Duhash and Ann Florini, "Mapping Global
Energy Governance," Global Policy, Special Issue 1 (2011), pp.
6-18.
(4) Gal Luft, "Dependence on Middle East Energy and Its Impact
on Global Security," Institute for the Analysis of Global Security;
www.iags.org/luft_dependence_on_middle_east_energy.pdf.
(5) See, e.g., Muhammad Makki, "China's Quest for Arctic
Access and Resources," Journal of Energy Security 19 (April 2012),
www.ensec.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=351:chinas-quest- for-arctic-access-aamp-resources&catid=123:content&Itemid=389.
(6) Ann Florini and Benjamin K. Sovacool, "Bridging the Gaps
in Global Energy Governance," Global Governance 17 (2011), pp.
57-74.
(7) Daniel Yergin, "Ensuring Energy Security," Foreign
Affairs 185, no. 2 (March/April 1996), p. 69.
(8) International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2011.
(9) Michael Marshall and Catherine Brahic, "Climate's
Dark Dawn," New Scientist 212, no. 2841 (December 3, 2011), pp.
6-7.
(10) Nigel Bruce, Rogelio Perez-Padilla, and Rachel Albalak,
"The Health Effects of Indoor Air Pollution Exposure in Developing
Countries," World Health Organization, WHO/SDE/OEH/02.05, 2002, P.
5; and John P. Holdren and Kirk R. Smith, "Energy, the Environment,
and Health," in Tord Kjellstrom, David Streets, and Xiaodong Wang,
eds., World Energy Assessment: Energy and the Challenge of
Sustainability (New York: UN Development Programme, 2000), pp. 61-110.
(11) Transparency International, "Bribe Payer's Index
2011"; bpi.transparency.org/bpi2011/results/.
(12) John Ruggie, "Interim Report of the Special
Representative of the Secretary-General on the Issue of Human Rights and
Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises," U.N.
Doc. E/CN.4/2006/97 (2006).
(13) International Energy Agency, Energy Technology Perspectives
2010; www.iea.org/techno/etp/index.asp.
(14) See, e.g., Marilyn A. Brown and Benjamin K. Sovacool, Climate
Change and Global Energy Security: Technology and Policy Options
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).
(15) Navroz K. Dubash, "From Norm Taker to Norm Maker?: Indian
Energy Governance in Global Context," Global Policy 2, Special
Issue 1 (2ml), pp. 66-79.
(16) International Energy Agency (IEA), "China Overtakes the
United States to Become World's Largest Energy Consumer," July
20, 2010; www.iea.org/index_info.asp?id=1479.
(17) Bo Kong, "Governing China's Energy in the Context of
Global Governance," Global Policy 2, Special Issue 1 (2011), pp.
51-65.
(18) For an analysis of how energy trade and investment could be
better governed, see Arunabha Ghosh, "Seeking Coherence in
Complexity? The Governance of Energy by Trade and Investment
Institutions," Global Policy 2, Special Issue 1 (2011), pp.
106-119.
(19) The following discussion of the IEA is drawn from Ann Florini,
"The International Energy Agency in Global Energy Governance,"
Global Policy 2, Special Issue 1 (2011), pp. 40-50.
(20) For analysis of OPEC, see Andreas Goldthau and Jan Martin
Witte, "Assessing OPEC's Performance in Global Energy,"
Global Policy 2, Special Issue 1 (2011), pp 31-39.
(21) International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA);
www.irena.org/menu/index.aspx?mnu=cat& PriMenuID=46&CatID=6z;
accessed May 4, 2012.
(22) IRENA, "Decision on the Proposed Work Programme and
Budget for 2012," A/2/DC/1, Abu Dhabi, January 2012;
www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/WP2012.pdf.
(23) For details on these initiatives, see Ann Florini and Saleena
Saleem, "Information Disclosure in Global Energy Governance,"
Global Policy, Special Issue 1 (2011), pp 144-54.
(24) Susan Ariel Aaronson, "Limited Partnership: Business,
Government, Civil Society and the Public in the Extractive Industry
Transparency Initiative" (unpublished manuscript, November 20,
2010); available at ssrn.com/abstract=739912 or
dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1739912; and Virginia Haufler, "Disclosure
as Governance: The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and
Resource Management in the Developing World," Global Environmental
Politics 10, no. 3 (2010), pp. 53-73.
(25) Alex Barker, "EU Transparency Rules Tougher Than
Expected," Financial Times, October 24, 2011;
www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/o/ba484354-fe66-11eo-bac4-00144feabdco.html; and
William MacNamara and Christopher Thompson, "Shell Chief's
Warning on Dodd-Frank," Financial Times, March 2, 2011;
www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/o/f5dcb758-450a-11e0-80e7-00144feab49a.html.
(26) United Nations General Assembly, "Resolution Declaring
2012 the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All,"
A/RES/65/151; www.un.org/en/events/sustainableenergyforall/resources.shtml.
(27) "2012 International Year of Sustainable Energy for
All"; www.un.org/en/events/sustainableenergyforall/.
(28) This estimate of global GDP in 2011 comes from the CIA World
Factbook; www.cia. gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html; accessed May 4, 2012.
(29) For an overview of the rules governing energy financing, see
Peter Newell, "The Governance of Energy Finance: The Public, the
Private, and the Hybrid," Global Policy 2, Special Issue 1 (2011),
pp. 94-105.
(30) For a detailed assessment of the roles of export credit
agencies, see Christopher Wright, "Export Credit Agencies and
Global Energy: Promoting National Exports in a Changing World,"
Global Policy 2, Special Issue 1 (2011), pp. 133-43.
(31) For a detailed assessment of the roles of these banks in Asia
and energy governance, see Smita Nakhooda, "Asia, the Multilateral
Development Banks, and Energy Governance," Global Policy 2, Special
Issue 1 (2011), pp. 120-32.
(32) Clean Energy Ministerial, "Summary of CEM
Accomplishments"; www.cleanenergyministerial.
org/pdfs/CEM-ACCOMPLISHMENTS.pdf.
(33) Clean Energy Ministerial, Press Release;
superefficient.org/Resources/News%20and%20Announcements/
Clean%20Energy%20Ministerial.aspx.
(34) David Sandalow, "Innovative Technologies, Innovative
Diplomacy," blog post, April 29, 2012; www.
whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/29/innovative-
technologies-innovative-diplomacy.