5 january 2012, keeping the lights burning

Far-sighted and intellectually excellent european commissioners seem fewer and far between these days (though see 10 november 2011) but the slovenian with environment, janez potocnik, is shaping up well, and making the most of a portfolio where the eu has more relevance than most. Having managed to goad london's mayor into action to avoid a £300 million fine, his latest foray is more philosophical, taking the traditional malthusian fear that the natural resources at mankind's disposal are finite and identifying something of a contemporary tipping point which melds with the current economic crisis and propels it. In fact, his call for greater energy efficiency is essential, and his argument about how greater resource efficiency can make europe more competitive (by it costing us less to be more productive) right, but the sad truth is that because we are so incredibly unproductive compared to the growth economies, we'll be little more than starting to catch up. Whilst each of the 300m us citizens uses about 57 barrels of oil a year (some 22% of the world's total energy consumption), each of india's 1132m people use around 3 (5%). As global population and industrialisation, and so demand, continues to rise, so will price, meaning janez is right that our current dependence on such high levels of energy consumption are going to become crippling. However the politics of increasing the price of electricity in europe or of petrol in america, or of carbon taxes in either, are impossible. The real tipping point is when we stop playing with carbon trading and price production and people out of excessive energy use to radically change behaviour and spark real innovation from desperation. We're still a million kilowatts away from that.