Energy crisis - World faces its biggest challenge

This week much of Europe has been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In time it could well be considered as one of greatest seminal moments in world history, akin to the impact of the French Revolution, which began with the fall of the Bastille in 1789.

Both events were largely symbolic. “The fall of the Berlin Wall brought hope and opportunity to people everywhere,” Mikhail Gorbachev writes today. He is the man who will forever be most associated with the event, because he essentially allowed it to happen.

Today he is writing in his new capacity as the founding president of Green Cross International, he is heading the International Climate Change Task Force. He recalls that moment in June 1987 when President Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and challenged him to “tear down this wall”.

Since then Mr Gorbachev argues that other symbolic walls have divided people, such as the barrier between the industrialised states and those that wish to develop by industrialisation, or the divide between those who have heeded the scientific evidence of climate change, and those who have resisted it by pandering to vested interests. And there is the gulf between those who recognise the need for change and the leaders who are letting them down.

“The climate crisis is the new wall that divides us from our future, and current leaders are vastly underestimating the urgency, and potentially catastrophic scale, of the emergency,” Mr Gorbachev warns. In the 1980s the world seemed to be heading towards nuclear disaster, but the challenge was met.

The incredible changes of 1989 had seemed virtually impossible just a few years earlier. Now Mr Gorbachev calls on the current leaders to tackle current problems.

“This is your wall, your defining moment. You cannot dodge the call of history.” He has challenged the various leaders to assemble at the climate change conference in Copenhagen to confront the new problems.

The International Energy Agency’s survey —World Energy Outlook 2009, launched yesterday in London — analyses the impact of the financial crisis on the energy sector, and provides a graphic insight into the challenges facing the world. Some 1.5 billion people in underdeveloped parts of the world do not have access to electricity. Such poverty must be changed.

By 2030 the demand for energy is projected to increase by 93%. The need for oil is projected to increase by 23.5% at the same time, but the output from current oil fields are projected to decline by 66%. Hence major new sources of oil are going to be necessary, or they will have to be a massive shift in energy sources. Improved energy efficiency and technological deployment are therefore critical, the International Energy Agency warns.

These changes will be expensive, but the money available is depleting as fast as the resources. Spending on energy is projected to fall by 19%, or $90bn, this year. This amounts to a grim warning of the challenges ahead.