For Americans peak oil just means higher pump prices. We can get through by outbidding the world for the oil we need.
For India, not so much. That may be why India treats The War Against Oil far more seriously than we do. The former Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources was renamed last year, to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, and a wide variety of energy forms are being tried-out.
According to a chart produced by the ministry, improved cookstoves have reached more of their potential than any other improvement, followed by biogas plants and small hydroelectric plants. The India Times reports that the minister, Vilas Muttemwar, has been in Europe at a Biofuels conference, noting that renewable energy companies there can be 100% foreign-owned.
This is the way the war goes when you don’t have many resources, but some sense of urgency, and while the experimentation is welcome, the national goal of getting 10% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 still seems a long way off.
It has to seem even further off when you have western leaders like
Peter Mandelson, a former Blair spin doctor who is now the EU’s trade
commissioner, suggesting that the continent should start importing
biofuel resources should be imported, meaning they would be unavailable
for use locally.
Every country must fight The War Against Oil with urgency, and
developing countries like India are no exception. But with few
resources available for new technology, they wind up mainly struggling
to use energy more efficiently and to create small, localized, limited
systems. It will take global cooperation to improve things, which won’t
occur until there’s a new commitment to the War in the U.S.
