ENERGY: The Challenge of Expanding Supplies to 2 Billion People

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 22 2001 (IPS) - The lack of access to electricity by one-third of the world population is the biggest challenge facing suppliers, oil industry representatives and government officials from more than 60 countries, meeting in the Argentine capital, agreed Monday.

Around two billion of the world’s six billion people have no access to energy, underlined participants in the 18th World Energy Council Congress, which opened Sunday and runs through Thursday in Buenos Aires with the participation of more than 3,000 delegates.

Several Latin American presidents as well as the president of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Algerian Oil Minister Chakib Khelil, are also expected to attend the conference.

The congress of the World Energy Council (WEC) is held every three years, and is touted on the web site of the London-based non- governmental energy policy forum as “the largest and most important international energy event.” The theme of this year’s edition, which coincides with a time of crisis for the international economy, is “Energy Markets: The Challenges of the New Millenium”.

Participants forecast that the Sep 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the US-British military reprisal against the alleged perpetrators would deepen the global recession.

They also stressed the need to launch a new round of multilateral trade talks, and to highlight the benefits of globalisation, even if that process has failed to live up to many of its promises, in the words of Peter Sutherland, with British Petroleum.

It is not easy to sell the benefits of globalisation at a time of upset for the economies of industrialised countries, Sutherland told the conference Monday.

When it came to debating initiatives aimed at satisfying unmet demand for energy, discrepancies arose. Environmentalists, for example, demanded investment in clean technology, for the sake of future generations.

The president of Japan’s Federation of Energy Companies, Hiroji Ota, said Asia, and his country in particular, were heavily dependent on oil from the Middle East.

Ota thus announced that Japan would promote the development of nuclear energy, a project that he said would enjoy US support.

Greenpeace Argentina sent a message to the conference underlining that fossil fuels like coal and oil were the main causes of global warming. However, the international environmental group expressed its opposition to a return to investment in nuclear energy.

Some business representatives conceded that efforts to meet unsatisfied demand must be accompanied by a reduction in the environmental impact of fuels. Participants mentioned programmes for the development of solar energy, and called for greater state participation in protecting intellectual property rights in such endeavours.

But Sutherland criticised the environmentalists as “romantics” who sought to “demonise” companies while calling for a return to the pre-industrial age. He said activists did not care if poor countries had to diminish consumption, thereby curbing development, for the sake of the environment.

Japan’s initiative to relaunch its nuclear energy programme is expected to trigger controversy. Ota, ignoring environmentalists’ criticism of the risks posed by nuclear power plants and the problem of how to dispose of spent uranium, said atomic energy could be “peaceful and safe.”

At the inauguration of the first WEC congress to be held in Latin America, Argentine President Fernando de la Rúa stated that “the countries that have contributed to the greenhouse effect and which have failed to live up to environmental accords…will have to make the greatest efforts to curb the problem, which has a heavy impact on climate change.”

Japan and the United States are two of the countries that have contributed most heavily to global warming, but refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at regulating emissions of greenhouse gases.

“The burning of fossil fuels is the origin of the destruction of the climate, which is already causing disasters, like the current flooding in Argentina,” said Juan Carlos Villalonga, with Greenpeace’s energy campaign, referring to the rainfall that has flooded the country’s main farming region.

Greenpeace insists that governments must accelerate implementation of international conventions in order to check climate change.

Villalonga also said companies were responsible for taking decisive action in developing sources of clean, efficient energy, like solar and wind power.