GLOBAL FUTURE ANALYSIS


ENERGY | Crunch


What is the Energy Crunch (often called the Energy Crisis)? An situation where the demand for energy outstrips the supply of energy and energy prices starts to rise severely to economies burdening/burning/threatening levels, with the additional risk of even physical shortages (as in: everything stops, because everything uses energy). Is an Energy Crisis something that effects only the energy industry or does it effect society? The Energy Crisis will not effect negative the energy companies (their turnover figures only got better and better), an Energy Crisis will certainly effect very severely negative an economy. Energy is not just a side facet of each economy, it's the motor (as credit is the fuel). The Energy Crisis is about the fact that energy becomes to expensive for the high energy use economic model we have build. When energy becomes too expensive, everything becomes too expensive, as we use energy for everything. The 'music' will go play slower as energy costs will burden each budget. Higher prices will inflation. Higher prices with no economic growth will give stagflation (a friendly world for recession of an Economic Crisis). Economies will retract, bleeding bankruptcies and jobcuts. A self empowering downwards spiral, just like cheap energy was a self empowering upwards spiral. The Energy Crisis and the Economic Crisis it will cause will lead to huge international tensions and even wars. Afghanistan (gas pipeline), Iraq (oil), Iran (gas and oil) and Georgia (pipelines) are examples of this. War is an economic waste. The prosperity of the last decades is very much due to the absence of war. War burn economies and people and have very huge afterwards price components (due to economic damages, family destructions, physical and psychological damages, etc, etc). Fighting a war is not producing services and goods. War is economic negative. The energy crisis will also lead to more nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is severely asking for trouble: a relative small (5%) and temporally (max 15 years) solution with much bigger problems and risks into it. Building more reactors on one site is multiplying risks.


Author: Gijs Graafland


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