Much green needed to go green

By 2050, the world population will top nine billion. Where's the food, water, and energy going to come from?

Samuel Bodman [U.S. energy secretary] attending two days of meetings in northern Japan among energy chiefs from Group of Eight industrialized countries and other top economies, said the surge in world oil prices was largely a simple problem of supply and demand.

Production has stalled since 2005 at 85 million barrels a day, while economic growth — particularly in China and India — has pushed demand ever higher, Bodman said before a meeting of ministers from the U.S., Japan, South Korea, India and China.

"We're in a difficult position where we have a lid on production and we have increasing demand in the world," he told a small group of reporters, dismissing the effects of speculation and unclear inventory levels and other factors on oil prices.

By JOSEPH COLEMAN, Associated Press Writer Sat Jun 7

In other words, oil, as energy, is only getting to become scarcer and/or more expensive. and that's the oil-friendly Bush administration saying this.

Also this week, the International Energy Agency

put a figure on the amount it will cost to go green, and it’s a lot: $45 trillion. Even when you spread that amount over the next 42 years, it’s still more than $1 trillion annually, or more than the GDP of many industrialized nations.

Nobuo Tanaka, the agency’s executive director, gave the figure as part of a report calling for “a global energy revolution.” He called for “immediate policy action and technological transition on an unprecedented scale.” The world needed to “completely transform the way we produce and use energy.”