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Energy question may spell end of the good life for the West
Business View by David Montagu-Smith

IN HIS 1939 book On the Marble Cliffs, the German soldier and scholar Ernst Jünger showed how a comfortable, complacent society could sleep-walk into catastrophe by refusing to read the signs of impending danger.
We may be nearing a Marble Cliffs moment of our own, not just in this country, but all across the developed world, in terms of the energy outlook.

Since the Second World War, the economic and social progress of the planet, for better and worse, has been heavily influenced by the policies and cultural make-up of OECD nations. That progress, if such it be, has been fuelled largely by supplies of oil and natural gas from parts of the world over which, in one way or another, OECD members have held sway.

In this process, the main supply source, Opec oil-producing countries, have with one or two aberrations maintained a moderate stance, with the result that the cost of “raw” energy has not consistently sustained its real value. A major reason for this has been the competitive force of non-Opec oil and gas production.

This comfortable world, as we have known it, is coming to a crucial turning point. And energy, specifically the cost and security of energy supply, lies at the apex of this turning point.