Global Shift: The Challenges of Energy Interdependence and Climate Change

The global energy system, the base for all social development, represents one of the critical infrastructures of the international system. It is marked by a high degree of interdependence, and global management of this interdependence will pose serious challenges during the next decades. At the same time, the fact that world energy demand presently is, and will continue to be, largely met by fossil fuels links this system closely to the world’s ecosphere: the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas is the most important driver of global warming and climate change. Present trends of global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) are unsustainable if potentially catastrophic risks related to global warming are to be avoided. Yet national and international policies with regard to GHG and, specifically carbon dioxide emissions, so far clearly have been insufficient to deliver the deep changes needed.

The United States, the European Union, and China are particularly critical actors in this regard; their policies will shape developments in global energy and climate change governance. Their policies will have to change if present trends are to be modified. So must international policies to limit global warming, which as of today are largely based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and rely on a global negotiation framework — an approach that is deeply problematic in several important respects.

This paper proposes a different way to address the intertwined challenges of energy and climate change, namely through negotiation and joint implementation of an energy price trajectory, initially between member states of the transatlantic community but with the perspective to include others, most importantly China.