How will humanity manage peak oil and climate change impacts and promote an ordered and gradual transition to low carbon economies?

The strong environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions derived from oil use and the negative socio-economic consequences of future oil scarcity make it urgent to shift to alternative affordable energy sources. A recent assessment of the International Energy Agency, an OECD prestigious institution, alerts that oil shortage and increased energy costs can easily be an immediate reality after the current financial crisis if massive and strategic investments in oil industry are not rapidly and massively implemented.

Multiple economic, scientific, technological and political pathways should be implemented to achieve this global energy transition. States should empower their national strategies to improve the efficiency in energy generation, transmission and consumption and thus reduce progressively carbon emissions. States should also facilitate the massive deployment of renewable energies and public transport, promote the progressive electrification of the car industry, and globally shift to sustainable strategies in many other economic sectors. At the international level, governments should rapidly promote multilateral and bilateral cooperative agreements on energy and climate policies. In addition, states might promote the creation of a United Nations international programme to facilitate and coordinate a world-wide ordered and non-traumatic transition to low-carbon and energy-efficient economie. This UN international programme could develop or facilitate multilateral regulatory agreements to avoid the emergence of speculative dynamics and volatility on oil prices that ultimately damage economic stability and increase ongoing global food-security crisis. Finally, I advocate for a much greater scientific effort urgently placed on the interactions between peak oil, climate change and global society change. The scale, urgency and severity of peak oil and climate change mean that no action is too small to matter, too large to contemplate, or too soon to begin. There is not much time left.

Barring the known ones, can we discover new sources of energy within the earth?

At the present our energy need is met with sources like coal, oil and gas, nuclear minerals and hydel power, and the ones like solar, wind, tides etc., are still to be harnessed with commercial viability. Thus, still our chief energy source is fossil fuels which are all set to exhaust at the most in 50-75 years with the current rate of their exploitation. Though nuclear energy is there as a future hope, it is beset with many environmental problems. Can scientists, more so earth scientists think of tapping the energy by different modes that could have been trapped within the earth. The earth’s birth and evolution has been possible through immeasurable amount of energy mainly through ‘fire works’ from both outside and within the earth. In what form is this energy bound? In what form the energy is still availbale for all the internal turbulence of the earth? Can we break it? if so how? Can this thinking be given a chance to germinate new ideas in the quest for new sources of energy from within our own ‘good earth’?

Which between the oil shortage crisis and the climate crisis will hit first?

The climate and energy crisis are probably the different faces of the same coin but their effects on societies will be much different. Living in a world of endless sources of energy in a degraded environment is not the same as living in an environmentally friendly world with scarce energy resources. Should the energy crisis drives the governmental policies with hope to solve the climatic issue in the way or should the climate crisis be used to drive the implementations of new energetic policies?

As an example, it is now well known that few economic scenarios proposed in the IPCC reports are not realistic in term of energy sustainability.