>2020 Global Energy Scenarios

Introduction: The world is increasingly aware that fundamental changes will be necessary to meet the growing demand for energy. There are many possible scenarios about what may emerge in the foreseeable future. Four such scenarios were constructed by the Millennium Project and are presented here. All the research related to their construction is available in the CD included with the 2008 State of the Future.

These scenarios describe how alternative global energy conditions could emerge. Each explores plausible cause-and-effect links and illustrates key decisions, events, and consequences throughout the narratives. Much of the content of these scenarios is based on the results from a two-round Delphi. The first round collected judgments from an international panel regarding events and conditions drawn from the Project energy team’s assessment of major global energy scenarios and related research reports. This assessment and an annotated bibliography of these scenarios and reports, along with extensive endnotes for this chapter, are available in the CD included with the 2008 State of the Future section 3, “Global Scenarios.” The second round collected comments on draft scenarios constructed from the results of the first round of the Delphi.

The four axes for the scenarios were: rate of technological breakthroughs, strength of environmental movement impacts, status of economic growth, and conditions of geopolitics, including war, peace, and terrorism. Each of the axes could be high, low, or moderate (for vacillating) between now and 2020. The scenario team selected the combination of conditions of axes that might produce the most interesting and plausible scenarios for further discussion in the energy policy process.

Abstract of the Scenarios:
Scenario 1. Business as Usual – The Skeptic
This scenario assumes that the global dynamics of change continue without great surprises or much change in energy sources and consumption patterns other than those that might be expected as a result of the change dynamics and trends already in place.
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Scenario 2. Environmental Backlash
This scenario assumes that the international environmental movement becomes much more organized; some groups lobby for legal actions and new regulations and sue for action in the courts, while others become violent and attack fossil energy industries.

Scenario 3. High-Tech Economy – Technology Pushes Off the Limits
This scenario assumes that technological innovations accelerate beyond current expectations and have impacts in the energy supply mix and consumption patterns of a magnitude similar to the Internet’s impact in the 1990s.

Scenario 4. Political Turmoil
This scenario assumes increasing conflicts and wars, with several countries collapsing into failed states, leading to increasing migrations and political instabilities around the world.
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Scenario 1. Business as Usual—The Skeptic
Moderate growth in technological breakthroughs Moderate environmental movement impacts Moderate economic growth Moderate changes in geopolitics and war/peace/ terrorism

A Caldron of Contradictions
The world of 2020 is a caldron of contradictions. It is a good time for some and a bad one for others, both promising and disappointing, full of apparent opportunities and broken promises, a world of both hope and despair. There have been only moderate technological breakthroughs in energy and other fields. Environmental impacts, while not benign, at least have not yet been catastrophic. Economic growth has been cyclical; geopolitics and terrorism have been brutal sometimes and quiet at other times. In short, with some exceptions, most past trends have continued to our time. The shifts that have occurred seem to have a random quality and are applauded or despised largely on the basis of politics, ethnicity, or nationality. One trend, however—continuing energy demand growth—has reached a crescendo, and most people in the world are now feeling its consequences.

To read the full report: GLOBAL ENERGY SCENARIOS