And yet the actual share of renewable energy has been declining, as it hasn’t kept pace with China’s growing appetite for energy.Ī crucial vulnerability for China is its utter dependence on world markets to supply its economy with energy and other resources. It is also the world’s largest producer, exporter, and installer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles. China is now the world’s largest energy consumer, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, the fifth-largest producer of oil, the seventh-largest producer of natural gas, and the largest miner of coal. The authors argue that the rise of China has sent shockwaves through world energy markets. The first part of the book discusses the implications of our fossil-fuel-based energy system on international relations, while the second part examines ongoing and future changes in the global energy system. This book provides a wide-ranging panorama of global energy politics, which the authors define as “the struggle over who gets what, when, and how in energy use and production from an international perspective.” In doing so, it builds an analytical framework that combines the tools and insights of political science, economics, development studies, physical geography, and sociology. For this reason, a new volume, Global Energy Politics, by Thijs Van de Graaf and Benjamin K. This means that energy questions are at the heart of modern geopolitics and have been the source of international conflict. Some high energy-consuming parts of the world - especially East Asia and Europe - only have limited local supplies of energy resources, which tend to be concentrated in certain parts of the world. Thus, fossil fuels still account for around 80 percent of the world’s primary energy consumption.
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This has stimulated a dramatic increase in the consumption of renewable energies like solar, wind and geothermal, however from a very low base. The use of fossil fuels has had devastating effects on the natural ecosystem, notably the planet’s climate. While this has generated substantial improvements in human well-being, even today almost a billion of the world’s citizens still do not have access to electricity, and many more suffer from supply that is of poor quality. Since the Industrial Revolution, rapid economic development has been powered by fossil fuels, notably coal, petroleum and natural gas. The global energy challenge of ensuring secure, sustainable, and affordable access to energy for all is deeply political. Despite recent advances in renewable energy production, we still live in a fossil-fuel driven civilisation.