During the brief era of leadership of the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–1991), civil society was born – or reborn – in public participation concerning a wide variety of issues in which environmental concerns began to occupy a central position. Gorbachev's policies of perestroika (restructuring, revolution) and glasnost (openness) at first encouraged public involvement, although he thought he could control its extent; ultimately, he could not shape or control the forces of political change he had supported with the goal of revitalizing the Soviet system. Indeed, openness shed direct light on the nature of that system – the high level of corruption among officials; the waning support among citizens; the shocking environmental costs of the Soviet development model; and the recognition that talk of the advantages of socialism had become empty sloganeering, in particular after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 that became a symbol for endemic technological failure, pollution, and profligate use of natural resources. Two years later, in connection with campaigns for a new legislative body, the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies, political parties, interest groups, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) formed that insisted on both investigation of the past and a new path to the socialist future, many of which were concerned with the environment.

A series of tensions played out in the environmental history of the Russian empire. These tensions had an impact on policies, practices, institutions, and human–nature interactions in the Soviet period. One was top-down pressure to modernize, by which leading officials including such tsars as Peter the Great meant to westernize, in part through adopting enlightenment attitudes toward nature and landscape. By force of will – or force of military and political occupation – Russia would create modern industry and agriculture across an ever-expanding empire. A second tension existed precisely between the power of the state and the private sector, between autocracy and public participation. In the Russian Empire, given the central role of the state, which rivaled or exceeded that in other nations, any environmental concern – alarm about the health of the forest, worries about agricultural performance and quality of soils, or concerns of nascent conservation movements – played out against concerns about the power of the government. The state could be a force of modernization and reform yet also a brake on development through its policies. Granted, the tsarist state had fewer bureaucrats per capita than the major European states and relied on devolving administration on the local population – nobles, peasant communes, and so on. Still, regarding the environment, it had a crucial role. The tsars determined to expand the empire and tame the periphery, push back the frontier, settle the steppe, and create agriculture that met the needs of growing domestic markets and export. No longer would agriculture be subsistence. This required that arable land succumb to agronomy, that polar and subpolar regions reveal their secrets, that Siberia become a part of the patrimony of the tsars and contribute to the economy, and that nomadic and indigenous people in lightly settled areas give way to settlers.

Soon after Leonid Brezhnev and his allies in the party deposed Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, they claimed that the country had entered the stage of “developed socialism.” Khrushchev had embarrassed them by promising in 1961 to achieve Communism by 1980, clearly a difficult goal given the poverty in the countryside, the shortages of consumer goods in the cities, the growing costs of waging the Cold War, and increasing awareness of extensive environmental problems. In their claim of “developed socialism,” they sought to convey the message that socialist society had transformed into something qualitatively more advanced than in the Stalin and Khrushchev eras and rivaled the capitalist West. Developed socialism became a frame of reference throughout Brezhnev's days in power against both the nation's own and Western achievements in a variety of areas. Economic growth, progress in culture and science, and advances in the areas of environmental protection and rational use of resources – all of these things indicated such achievements. Yet, environmental problems grew worse in the Brezhnev era, the pronouncements of the Soviet leaders notwithstanding. Erosion, deforestation, and pollution accelerated. The priority of economic development left the land disfigured, the water poisoned, the air polluted. Whether agriculture and its excessive use of chemical biocides, forestry and its indiscriminate clear cutting and waste, or industry and its mortal contamination, the Soviet system may have been “developed,” but it was also increasingly polluted “socialism.” The citizen – the ostensible beneficiary of the leadership's enlightened rule – lived in an increasingly dangerous environment.

During the New Economic Policy of the mid-1920s, the state focused more on economic recovery than on large-scale mining, metallurgy, forestry, fisheries, and geological engineering projects, although it insisted on controlling the “commanding heights” of industry. By the late 1920s, in a period of relative economic stability, if growing political intrigues involving who would succeed Lenin, the Bolsheviks were prepared to subject nature itself to their plans, no less than industry or labor. Stalin's self-proclaimed Great Break with past social, political, and economic policies involved – among other things – programs for rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture that had long-term extensive environmental impacts. Engineers who suggested a circumspect approach to construction projects, dams, forestry enterprises, and so on risked facing charges of subversion or wrecking. Stalinism was therefore not only a polity and economic program, but also a transformationist doctrine that would rebuild nature and the people in it for the “socialist reconstruction” of the nation.

During the Stalin era, party officials, economic planners, and engineers joined in the effort to master the empire's extensive natural resources toward the end of economic self-sufficiency and military strength. At their order, armies of workers began the process of constructing giant dams and reservoirs on major European rivers – the Don, Dniepr, and Volga. Irrigation systems spread across vast arid and semiarid areas of Central Asia, although never to the scale that planners hoped. The workers erected massive chemical combines, metal smelters, and oil refineries in both European and Siberian parts of the country, paying little attention to the pollution they produced. They put up entire cities to house the laborers, whom they exhorted to meet plans and targets irrespective of the environmental costs and the risks to the workers’ own health and safety. A major aspect of the labor enterprise was slave labor camps of the gulag system, which had their own environmental – and, of course, human costs.

The Soviet empire stretched 8,000 kilometers from Europe to the Pacific Ocean and 5,000 kilometers from the Arctic Ocean south to the Asian continent of Persia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and China. The vegetation, climate, and natural resources of this vast nation had remarkable diversity. In some respects one could claim that this was the wealthiest nation in the world, if only it could manage its resources rationally. A taiga consisting largely of boreal forest contained roughly one-half of the world's forests. Its major rivers – the Don, Dnieper, and Volga west of the Ural Mountains, the Ob, Irtysh, Lena, Angara, and Amur in Siberia – have total annual flow that rival those of the other great rivers of the world. Reserves of oil, gas, and coal; of iron, magnesium, manganese; bauxite (aluminum), gold, and platinum, often located in the frigid Arctic or Siberia; and other ores and minerals are among the richest in the world.

Yet, both the tsarist and Soviet governments largely mismanaged these resources, developed them in a haphazard fashion that contributed to their waste and profligate use, and took insufficient measures either to prevent extensive pollution or to engage in remediation once they discovered the severity of pollution problems, in spite of the fact of a long tradition of what we would call today ecological thought among scholars in the empire. Scientists under the Romanov dynasty failed to convince government officials, businesspeople, and even their own colleagues to adopt modern scientific management techniques to protect resources and ensure their availability for present and future generations (“conservation”); Nicholas II, the last Romanov, was more consumed by other issues, including pressure to reform the government in the direction of a constitutional monarchy, a war against Japan, and World War I.

At the end of World War II, the Communist Party approved the fourth Five-Year Plan (1946–1951), which, like the first Five-Year Plans, was dedicated to building – and in this case also rebuilding – the country's heavy industry and military sectors. As in the 1930s, investment income was extracted from the agricultural sector, whereas housing, light industry, and medicine were ignored. A famine in 1946 killed hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of citizens lived in burned-out hovels, rubble, or holes in the ground. The Stalinist Plan for the Transformation of Nature (1948) ensured that nature, too, no less than Soviet citizens, would serve reconstruction purposes through the taming of its resources and through its coal, oil and rivers generating power. The Soviet Union was an industrial economy, yet leaders had superimposed it on a backward agricultural community, and the economy remained dependent on forced labor in such sectors as mining, timber, fossil fuels, and power production. This was the Stalinist centrally planned economy, with its ability to mobilize resources fully and harshly, if not rationally.

When Stalin died in March 1953, a succession struggle broke out between Georgy Malenkov, Viacheslav Molotov, secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, and Nikita Khrushchev. By 1956, Khrushchev had won this struggle and embarked fully on a reform program that included the economy, culture, and society. After the novel The Thaw (Ottopel’, originally published in the journal Novyi Mir) by Ilya Ehrenburg, the Khrushchev era became known as the “thaw” period. De-Stalinization became the official policy, especially after Khrushchev condemned the excesses of Stalinism in a special session at the close of the twentieth Communist Party Congress in February 1956.

Symbolic of the Soviet environmental legacy, the sarcophagus that encases Chernobyl reactor number 4 is crumbling. Built heroically yet hastily under dreadfully dangerous circumstances, it is unlikely that it will outlive typical aging processes of any concrete. In spite of efforts to strengthen it, it may collapse, leading to the release of tons of radioactive dust. The European Union (EU) and the United States agreed to provide the perhaps $2 billion needed to build a new sarcophagus for the reactor – 325 feet tall, 800 feet wide, and 475 feet long. Construction has been delayed several times and it is unclear when it will be completed. This would permit the first entombment to be dismantled and all remaining nuclear fuel to be removed from the site. The entire station, closed for years, with unfinished cooling towers of additional planned reactors, serves as a ghostly reminder of the costs of pushing ahead to produce electricity without circumspectly considering the social and environmental costs of development. Yet around the station and in the exclusion zone, wild horse, boar, lynx, and wolf populations have returned to the area, and birds are even nesting in the reactor building without any obvious ill effects. This suggests how the zone has become a vibrant ecosystem when sealed off from general human use. But, of course, nature exists only in interaction with human beings.

Introduction

Energy is essential for human development and energy systems are a crucial entry point for addressing the most pressing global challenges of the 21st century, including sustainable economic and social development, poverty eradication, adequate food production and food security, health for all, climate protection, conservation of ecosystems, peace and security. Yet, more than a decade into the 21st century, current energy systems do not meet these challenges.

A major transformation is therefore required to address these challenges and to avoid potentially catastrophic future consequences for human and planetary systems. The Global Energy Assessment (GEA) demonstrates that energy system change is the key for addressing and resolving these challenges. The GEA identifies strategies that could help resolve the multiple challenges simultaneously and bring multiple benefits. Their successful implementation requires determined, sustained and immediate action.

Transformative change in the energy system may not be internally generated; due to institutional inertia, incumbency and lack of capacity and agility of existing organizations to respond effectively to changing conditions. In such situations clear and consistent external policy signals may be required to initiate and sustain the transformative change needed to meet the sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

The industrial revolution catapulted humanity onto an explosive development path, whereby, reliance on muscle power and traditional biomass was replaced mostly by fossil fuels. In 2005, some 78% of global energy was based on fossil energy sources that provided abundant and ever cheaper energy services to more than half the people in the world.

Executive Summary

Uninterrupted provision of vital energy services (see Chapter 1, Section 1.2.2) – energy security – is a high priority of every nation. Energy security concerns are a key driving force of energy policy. These concerns relate to the robustness (sufficiency of resources, reliability of infrastructure, and stable and affordable prices); sovereignty (protection from potential threats from external agents); and resilience (the ability to withstand diverse disruptions) of energy systems. Our analysis of energy security issues in over 130 countries shows that the absolute majority of them are vulnerable from at least one of these three perspectives. For most industrial countries, energy insecurity means import dependency and aging infrastructure, while many emerging economies have additional vulnerabilities such as insufficient capacity, high energy intensity, and rapid demand growth. In many low-income countries, multiple vulnerabilities overlap, making them especially insecure.

Oil and its products lack easily available substitutes in the transport sector, where they provide at least 90% of energy in almost all countries. Furthermore, the global demand for transport fuels is steadily rising, especially rapidly in Asian emerging economies. Disruptions of oil supplies may thus result in catastrophic effects on such vital functions of modern states as food production, medical care, and internal security. At the same time, the global production capacity of conventional oil is widely perceived as limited. These factors result in rising and volatile prices of oil affecting all economies, especially low-income countries, almost all of which import over 80% of their oil supplies.

Introduction

Energy is essential for human development and energy systems are a crucial entry point for addressing the most pressing global challenges of the 21st century, including sustainable economic, and social development, poverty eradication, adequate food production and food security, health for all, climate protection, conservation of ecosystems, peace, and security. Yet, more than a decade into the 21st century, current energy systems do not meet these challenges.

In this context, two considerations are important. The first is the capacity and agility of the players within the energy system to seize opportunities in response to these challenges. The second is the response capacity of the energy system itself, as the investments are long-term and tend to follow standard financial patterns, mainly avoiding risks and price instabilities. This traditional approach does not embrace the transformation needed to respond properly to the economic, environmental, and social sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

A major transformation is required to address these challenges and to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences for human and planetary systems. The GEA identifies strategies that could help resolve the multiple challenges simultaneously and bring multiple benefits. Their successful implementation requires determined, sustained, and immediate action.

The industrial revolution catapulted humanity onto an explosive development path, whereby reliance on muscle power and traditional biomass was replaced mostly by fossil fuels. In 2005, approximately 78% of global energy was based on fossil energy sources that provided abundant and ever cheaper energy services to more than half the world's population.