The following article has been republished with kind permission from China Dialogue. It was written by Wei Wei and Wang Erde. Please note that the original title was - Nuclear, Not Fracking, is The Answer to China Future Energy Needs.
Gal Luft works as an advisor to the US Energy Security Council, an NGO based in the US. This is an edited version of an interview first published by 21st Century Business Herald.
He allows that energy security is two things - 1. energy availability and 2. energy affordability. You can have all the energy in the world, but if it is highly priced, you do not have energy security. You can also have cheap energy but if it is easily disrupted you also do not have energy security. In 2005, many in the United States were talking about a natural gas crisis, so they subsequently built 14 terminals to import natural gas. Within seven years, there was a technological breakthrough and the United States had the opposite problem. It has too much natural gas, the price was too cheap and everybody was losing money. The U.S. now exports natural gas.
When everybody talks about running out of this or that it reminds me of what Thomas Malthus once said that the world was running out of food but that was 300 years ago. He claims that there is enough energy on the planet to bring prosperity to everyone on the planet...if only the system would do that at a reasonable cost.
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