CO2, money, and security

Dec. 12, 2011
The leader of the International Energy Agency performed a service at an important international meeting in Durban, South Africa, last week by highlighting the linkage between energy security and efforts to moderate climate change.

The leader of the International Energy Agency performed a service at an important international meeting in Durban, South Africa, last week by highlighting the linkage between energy security and efforts to moderate climate change. But the view she expressed of security was too narrow.

"We won't adequately address the issue of carbon emissions if we fail to address the issue of energy security," said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven at a meeting of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. Van der Hoeven referred several times to energy security, always in the context of meeting global demand for energy. But she never expanded the concept of security beyond the link between carbon and energy supply.

Too bad. Energy security has to do with more than btus.

Europe reels

As Van der Hoeven spoke, and as others in Durban warned of catastrophic warming as greenhouse gases of human origin accumulate in the atmosphere, Europe reeled. On Dec. 5, Standard & Poor's provided a harsh reminder that coordinated aid from six central banks the previous week hadn't solved a financial crisis. The ratings service put the governments of 15 of the 17 countries that have adopted the euro on watch for credit downgrade. Of the other two Eurozone countries, one, Cyprus, already was on watch, and the other, Greece, had been downgraded.

Governments met last week to seek economic remedies and coordinate responses of the 10 European Union members not using the euro. Austerity measures in distressed countries made populations restive. Fiscally stronger governments faced resentment of citizens toward the need to rescue Eurozone counterparts. Countries around the world wondered how a European collapse might affect them. Markets radiated anxiety.

These conditions induce geopolitical tension, which diminishes security. To make this observation is not to predict war in Europe. That Europe is less secure now than it was before the financial crisis is nevertheless obvious. And the reason is fiscal and economic strain.

Part of that strain relates to the energy-climate dynamic highlighted by the IEA executive director. EU countries have grabbed the lead in climate-change precaution. Many of them heavily subsidize carbon-free energy. The EU has a carbon-emissions trading system. And energy costs in Europe have zoomed. National treasuries feel the pressure—directly where governments fund energy subsidies and indirectly where consumers pay too much for energy and economies consequently suffer.

Imposed energy cost is hardly the only source of European financial woe. But it's a factor demonstrating that energy security relates to more than physical supply. It also relates to money.

In Durban, the IEA chief, like most observers, treated cost separately from energy security—and sketchily at that. Calling for immediate improvement in energy efficiency—always sound counsel—she said, "Some of these measures are cost-saving; many others will need careful polices to minimize outlays." Indeed. But European policies, like many in the US and elsewhere, have been anything but careful. They're too often open-ended sweet deals for producers of uneconomic energy, financed by taxpayers and energy consumers. In fact, some European capitals, with costs biting hard, have begun cutting the handouts.

IEA steadfastly champions carbon mitigation. It recently published impossibly precise projections of global average temperature with and without cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide. To IEA, calibration of temperature to CO2 levels is an assumption for economic projections, not a scientific question.

Question rejected

In this orientation, IEA isn't alone. Much discussion about climate and energy rejects questions about the CO2-temperature relationship altogether. But that's a political judgment, too frequently rendered to obscure the possibility that scientists eventually will find human influence over observed temperature, as opposed to atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, to be minimal.

If nothing else, the security implications of cost-blind precaution—manifest in its contribution to European instability—should bring more attention to that possibility than it has received to date.

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