A Problem in Global Resources and the Environment

Global problems are not just important problems, or problems that affect many people. Rather they are those problems that affect the whole of the planet, and potentially all of the people who live on it. Climate change is one clear example that springs to mind quickly. This is because the consequences of humanly-generated changes in the atmosphere will, affect everyone on the planet. In other words, the consequences are universal. Moreover, unless we profoundly change our collective behavior, climate change may well result in irreversible changes in the climatic conditions of life a measure of the deep vulnerability of human society in the face of this issue. And it is easy to see that there will be no easy solution to the problem: the causes of the present situation are clearly related to our economic system, our attitudes to nature, our political organization, our technological capacities and preferences, and our uses of resources. Solutions will involve not just all communities and every country, but solutions will necessarily involve cooperation between all, rather than individual approaches. In other words, the example of climate change suggests that global problems are complex, intractable, and make human society as a whole very vulnerable.

In a few short years, energy has changed from a minor to a major concern of United States foreign policy. The simple explanation for this development is of course the recent shift of the United States from a position of near self-sufficiency in energy to one of substantial dependence on imported oil. More fundamentally, however, the emergence of energy as a major foreign policy problem must be explained in terms of the unexpected appearance of serious discontinuities and uncertainties in what had long been regarded as a smooth and relatively predictable process. During the present century, oil has gradually replaced coal as the world's major source of energy. Until recently, it was generally assumed that oil would in...