Energy strategies for the South from the North: Freezing inequalities

This article is part of the series Comprehensive Energy Monitor: India and the World

There is some disappointment from climate-concerned institutions within and outside India that the G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration contains only vague commitments to reduce the use of fossil fuels. For example, the declaration that efforts will be made to phase down unabated coal power in line with national circumstances has ambiguity built into every word. The irony is that four decades ago when crude oil supply and prices were the major energy concern and not climate change, the use of coal (and nuclear energy) was proposed as the ideal choice for the third world. The motivation was to restrict the consumption of crude oil by the third world so as to ensure affordable and abundant crude oil supplies for the industrialised part of the World. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that strategies motivated by self-interest have resulted in unanticipated negative consequences, notably high carbon emissions from the third world. Recent research on global carbon mitigation pathways has concluded that on average, mathematically modelled scenarios of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that underpin global carbon mitigation goals, freeze existing inequalities in energy consumption and development to maintain developed countries’ (now labelled Global North) energy and emission privileges far into the future.

Us and them

Reports that emerged in the early 1980s from high-profile global conferences such as the Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies, the Istanbul World Energy Conference and the voluminous report ‘Energy in a Finite World’ by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) which included the contribution of over 250 scientists concluded that the most important development in the 21^st century would be the exponential growth of third world energy needs.

By the year 2000, third-world countries were expected to be consuming energy of the same order of magnitude as Western European or North American consumption in the 1980s. A vicious cycle of growth of third-world energy needs that leads to heavier demand on the petroleum market which increases oil prices which in turn aggravates the World economy and limits growth in the oil-importing third-world countries was anticipated. This trend towards catastrophic World energy growth gave rise to a common consensus to accelerate nuclear programmes and the exploitation of coal in the third-world countries by the year 2000. Once this was accomplished, third-world nations, including OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) were expected to be net importers of energy and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries net energy exporters. This reversal of energy flows was based essentially on the exploitation of coal. 78 percent of known reserves of coal were located in Western countries and only 3 percent in the third world (not including China).

The fundamental implication was that the future of energy growth was already fully determined and that the only possible path-namely, a coal-nuclear strategy must be pursued without fail. The proposals called for a mechanical transposition of the solution that had been applied in the industrialised countries: reduction of the demand for traditional energies and the introduction of commercial energies with priority given to large inter-connected grids for electricity. This outlook clearly neglected many aspects that were important for future projections for the third world: (1) the specific features of the energy service needs and links between energy and specific development paths of the third world (2) the relevance of taking energy as a homogeneous product the requirements of which were linked to economic growth by a technical elasticity coefficient (3) the versatility of oil as a fuel and its competitiveness vis-à-vis other fuels.  Western economies looked at the traditional sectors of the third world strictly as a technical reality that will progressively disappear following the introduction of commercial energy sources. They estimated energy demand in synthetic units (tonnes of oil equivalent [toe], megawatts [MW]) that masked the real composition of energy needs and limited the possibilities of modulating energy profiles.

Freezing Inequalities

Given these misconceptions, it is no surprise that the energy landscape of the Global South (formerly the third world), is anything but what was anticipated by the Global North (formerly developed / industrialised countries). OPEC nations remain net energy exporters with undiminished energy and geopolitical influence. The non-OPEC Global South continues to be increasingly dependent on imported oil for their transportation needs. In addition, large sections of the Global South populations particularly in Africa and South Asia remain dependent on non-commercial fuels for most of their energy needs. Demand for oil from the Global South, particularly India and China were said to be contributing partly to high oil prices in the 2000s but this did not limit the growth of the Global South nor did the World run out of oil.  Non-commercial energy sources were substituted, not by coal or nuclear-fired electricity but by petroleum-based products such as Kerosene and LPG (liquified petroleum gas) that are more suitable for intermittent and short duration needs of lighting and heating.  But even today, more than 3 billion people in the Global South do not have enough energy to achieve decent living standards. 38 percent of the world’s population has access to less than 10 gigajoules (GJ) of energy per person per year, which is too low to meet even the most basic human needs.

According to the recent computational models of the IPCC, energy privilege of the Global North will remain at a per person level 2.3 times higher than in the Global South even by the turn of the century. In 2100, the IPCC models predict that the Global North will consume 119 GJ of energy per person per year compared to an average of 52 GJ per person per year for the Global South. According to the IPCC scenarios, African countries remain constrained to much less than 30 GJ per person per year for the rest of the century.

The models also freeze significant level of inequality in future GDP (gross domestic product) per person. In 2050, the per person GDP in the rest of the world in 2050 is restricted to a maximum of US$9,000-US$28,000 and for South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, it is restricted to even lower levels at about US$ 9,000 and US$ 8,000 respectively. To reconcile the Global North’s high energy use with the Paris Agreement targets, most scenarios rely heavily on bioenergy-based negative emissions technologies. This critically depends on appropriating land estimated to be three times the size of India in the Global South to maintain, and further increase, the Global North’s energy privilege.

Perpetuating large energy inequalities for the rest of the century cannot be the basis of combating climate change. The reasonable expectation is that a just transition should lead to energy convergence—reduce energy use in the Global North to achieve rapid emissions reductions, and ensure sufficient energy for development in the Global South. If energy justice is taken seriously as it should be, the Global North must scale down excess production and consumption to enable transition to a low carbon world. Global energy use should converge at a level that is sufficient for provide decent living standards for all within the constraints on carbon emissions.

• Climate Change
• India
• Carbon Emissions
• coal power
• energy growth
• energy inequality
• energy inequality
• energy privilege
• energy privilege
• fossil fuels
• PARIS AGREEMENT

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