Security in the Twenty-First Century. Case Study: Energy.
Security in the Twenty-First Century. Case Study: Energy.

Summary/Abstract: This paper considers three series of processes facing energy policy makers: the processes of technological innovation, the timescale of fossil fuel resource depletion and the timescale of harmful climate change. The paper posits a future of rapid climate change in which technological innovation struggles to match the demands placed upon it. In this scenario resource depletion recedes as a driver of energy policy. The paper considers a possible accompanying evolution in foreign and military policy over such a period. A future is described in which naval power is redeployed within a generation away from today’s mission of supporting unfettered free trade through international choke points to a role of interdiction and control by which the leading industrial powers, and their allies in the developing world, seek to prevent high carbon dioxide emissions from a few recalcitrant sovereign states. Historical parallels are drawn with the similarly rapid paced end to the Trans- Atlantic slave trade in the early Nineteenth Century.

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