Peaking Your Interest
It's Getting Hot in Herre

Here's a downer (or what I like to think of as a wake-up call) from the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook from the AP, via the WaPo:

Global energy needs will surge 50 percent by 2030 and prices will rise if capacity is not significantly increased, the International Energy Agency said Monday in its 2005 World Energy Outlook.

There are sufficient oil and natural gas reserves to meet those needs, particularly in North Africa and the Middle East, but about euro17 trillion (US$20 trillion) in new investments is urgently needed to bring those supplies to the consumer market, the agency said.

New energy sources will increasingly be needed to meet demand in growing economies like China and India.

But energy usage goes hand-in-hand with CO2 output (i.e., those nasty greenhouse gases that are making the globe a little warmer). Here's how Reuters reports this:

The world must change its energy habits or struggle with choking fumes, runaway oil demand and a growing dependence on the volatile Middle East for fuel, the International Energy Agency said on Monday.

Energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions will soar by more than 50 percent by 2030 if consumers keep burning oil unchecked, the IEA said in its World Energy Outlook.

That would blow a hole in the United Nations' Kyoto protocol aimed at cutting developed nations' emissions five percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

And here's what NPR's Day to Day had to say in this conversation between host Alex Chadwick and Marketplace reporter John Dimsdale:

Dimsdale: It's really due to the economic success of growing countries like China and India and South Korea. They've been emulating the US, Europe and Japan by building their economies using fossil fuels for electricity and transportation. So you add that growing demand to what developed countries are already using, and the IEA finds that the burning of oil and coal and natural gas is going to spew 50 percent more carbon dioxide and other global warming gases into the atmosphere by the year 2030.
[...]
Chadwick: So, do they offer any other solutions?

Dimsdale: Nothing that you haven't already heard. They're trying to switch away from carbon-based energy sources--solar, wind, hydrogen-based fuel cells. They're asking for these investments in alternative fuels on top of investments in refineries and pipelines from the whopping profits that oil companies have been making.

Marketplace also has a story about the purported "greenery" of nuclear power, which is being debated at a symposium hosted by the Nuclear Policy Research Institute:

Sam Eaton: A key issue is the nuclear power industry's multi-million dollar advertising campaign that says that nuclear power is the solution to global warming. The industry claims that nuclear power provides electricity without producing greenhouse gases. But Nulcear Policy Research Institute president Helen Caldicott says look at the entire process from mining and milling to waste storage, and a different picture arises.

Caldicott: At the moment, a nuclear power plant, when taking into account all the front end and back end of the fuel cycle, produces about one-third the amount of CO2 [garble]

Eaton: And Caldicott says that nuclear energy is far from sustainable. She says that if all electricity came from nuclear power, the world would run out of uranium within three years.