Contenu du sommaire : L'énergie à tout prix

Intelligence never held a place of honor in France, until the founding of a dedicated strategic function, in the framework of the 2008 French White Paper on defense and security. In a world that has never been so dangerous and hard to understand, is it a breaking off or a mere adaptation of the existing national intelligence machinery? The new system is tied up through the National Intelligence Council, with a National Coordinator as permanent secretary. In this way, there's discontinuance. But the outfit of the national organization does not change, while the cooperation between agencies, both institutional and operational, is reinforced, which is rather an adaptation. The actual challenge is mainly focused on the assets and capabilities that they will gain, despite a shortage in public office, and budgetary constraints. In such conditions, will the new strategic function “Anticipation and Knowledge” still be supported and fostered by the French high ranking national authorities?

The global balance of power is changing as the centre of gravity of the world's economy is moving from the OECD to the non-OECD area. The oil majors have built and dominated the world of capitalism for the past 100 years. Today, they are denied access to the vast mining perimeters in the resource-rich countries, in the Middle East in particular. On the contrary, national companies, after decades of underinvestment, are taking on the task of developing fields and infrastructures themselves, thereby increasingly dominating the oil and gas supply in the world. The Middle East will further absorb large resources from the global capital markets as most of the large infrastructures that are essential to the energy supply to the world will be developed in this region. In the years to come, both Asia and the Middle East will be the two regions where economic and energy demand growth will be the strongest. The Pacific rim will take over the old Atlantic basin as the heart of inter-regional energy trade. In this context, the top two largest economies in the world, at the same time the top two largest oil importers – the US and China – already find themselves in a competition towards securing access to and control over the cheapest and most abundant hydrocarbon reserves in the Middle East. The growing confrontation between the two empires is also reflective of two radically different concepts of energy security and oil diplomacy. As far as Europe is concerned, the strategy decision has been made by EU decision makers to focus on reducing the carbon footprint of the EU with a view to reducing the member states' dependence on imported fossil energy and reaping the future benefits of a carbon-free economy.

For over 50 years now, the global primary energy demand structure has been based on fossil fuels for more than 80%. In 25 years, our energy needs will still be covered by an over 80% fossil energy mix according to the reference scenario of most energy agencies. Over this period of time, the economics of energy will be radically altered as a result of a long term sustained global demand of energy and a growing constraint on some hydrocarbon production, conventional oil in particular. The oil production profile on currently operated oil fields, essentially in the OECD, will further decline or require significantly increasing investments. Non conventional oil sources are already proving to be even more capital-intensive. In the face of dwindling reserves in the old OECD hydrocarbon basins, the only resource-rich region in the world with low extraction costs and available swing supply capacities is the Middle East. Tomorrow's oil industry and markets will therefore represent a risk concentrated around a single region in the world, whilst the global gas industry will face a risk concentrated around two regions in the world, including Russia and the Middle East. Massive investments in energy infrastructures will be necessary to bring gas from these two sources to the remote markets in Asia, Europe or the US. The era of cheap energy is definitely gone. Far from being an obsolete fuel, coal is and will remain the most abundant, competitive and favoured source of energy for power generation across the world. CO2 emissions from coal use are coal's only handicap. The vision of our energy future is in front of us: the environment will be filthy, energy will be costly and geopolitical tensions between producers and consumers will be strong.

Energy consumption has developed significantly since the Second World War and population growth and improved living standards should see needs increasing even more. Traditional forecasts show that this energy consumption will continue to depend heavily on fossil energy. However, resources are limited and their use have a negative impact on the greenhouse effect and climate change. There is therefore a need to develop large quantities of renewable energy sources, to intensify energy saving programs and to pursue research in certain key areas.

The article examines the development of carbon markets in the world. Such markets are the main economic instrument of the international climate policy established by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and are being implemented by most industrialized countries. They are experimented by Europe since 2005 for industrial facilities and since 2008 by industrialized countries under Kyoto. The development of carbon markets will likely continue beyond 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires. Their expansion will be largely determined by the future international climate policy to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December 2009 and by the commitment of the largest economies like the United States. The authors describe the emergence of carbon markets, their basic principles and the experience of Kyoto and European markets. Then, they deal with the expected developments beyond 2012.

Energy, especially oil, is the source of wealth of two-thirds of SWFs, located in the Middle East, Africa, America, Russia and Norway. The countries exporting natural resources use these investment vehicles to fight against the drawbacks of their rent economy: price volatility, non-renewal of resources, resource curse and “dutch disease”. SWFs can indeed stabilize export earnings, preserve wealth for future generations and diversify the economy. Energy is also a prime area for investment of sovereign wealth funds, which have different objectives depending on their origin. The funds of the Persian Gulf, already rich in fossil resources, form partnerships with leading groups in the field of energy to acquire the technology they lack. The funds from countries lacking natural resources, such as China, seek to take control of foreign companies operating or processing raw materials with a view to secure energy independence of their country.

Crude oil prices evolution between 2007 and 2009 has been the centre of a major controversy. This paper aims to understand the structural changes which happened on the oil market during the past decade. Analysis is focused on the consequences on oil prices of growing financial investments in commodities. More specifically, emphasis is set on little commented facts that confort the hypothesis of a speculative bubble between 2007 and 2009.

The current economic crisis finds its origin in the existence of a global market for human capital, without unified prices: the development of a debt economy in Western countries can be regarded as an attempt to maintain economic growth in spite of the resulting pressure on labor wages. While the subprime crisis has shown the limits of such an attempt, the author believes that debt driven economic growth will continue to prevail in Western countries until price imbalances on the global market for human capital are resolved. This probably implies a substitution of public to private debt, and of private consumption to public investment with the resulting implications on public deficits, supply & demand, and relative prices. Energy prices will be sensitive to public spending's both mechanical impact on economic growth and qualitative impact on energy efficiency.

In a care of clarification, and as scientific approach analysing the deep reasons of conflicts, Alexandre Del Valle analyses in the framework of the geopolitical method, the “representations”. Thoses ones preside at the elaboration, by the political responsible faces of different struggling camps, of the processes of mobilization, which stumbling block is the most part of the time a rivalry of powers as to territories, resources and the strategies of influence. Sometimes, the stumbling block are also ideological stakes, namely when, fanatical (for example the Islamic Talibans, of AIG, of Ben Laden nets, Hamas, etc.), these one supplant momentarily the geo-economic requests. As reminds Del Valle, the identical, civilization and ideological representations are real, when even they are instrumentalized, as they “make sense” for thousands of human beings who are going to die for them and because they have real geo-political consequences. Considering that with the arrival of modern telecomputer science means and the general regaining of identically-orientated conflicts, consecutive at the end of the Cold War and the return of the identical rolled-back, consequence and reaction to the Globalization, the representations make more sense than ever, we think as to us that the statement war of representations is happier than ever to indicate this type of inseparable phenomena of the psychological and media war. From the point of media science and the psychological analysis, in fact, the war of representations dresses also a psychological and subversive dimension. In this context, the war of representations consists mainly to demoralize the enemy, distort his contact with the reality introducing to him a pseudo reality, a false representation of events more probably “true” and incontestable, as it seems irrefutable proved, even lived in direct by the stupefied spectator by “the reality” of the images. The technological progress in the domains of “virtual” thus contributed incontestable to break the boundary between the real and the imaginary, so that the strategies of collective manipulation at the services of authority and of the war were never as redoubtable as today, inside even of the societies said democratic.