A need for higher oil prices
A call for negotiations to stabilize world oil prices at a higher than current level was one of several controversial recommendations put to the World Commission on Environment and Development at its fifth meeting, hosted by the Canadian Government in Ottawa from 26 to 30 May 1986.
The recommendation was made in a report by the Advisory Panel on Energy and Sustainable Development chaired by H.E. Enrique Iglesias, Uruguay's Foreign Minister and formerly the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy.
The need to preserve gains made in energy efficiency and renewable energy resource development resulting from high energy prices in the 1970s underlies the Panel's concern over recent declines in oil prices. These declines threaten to encourage increased consumption. Less fuel consumed per unit of economic activity, the Panel stated, means less air pollution and less acidification. In addition, reduced fossil fuel consumption is important given the need for nations to confront the growing threat of climatic warming and rising sea levels, phenomena probably caused by increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide and trace gases from the burning of fossil fuels.
While the Panel laid great stress on energy efficiency measures applied to fuels used in the modern sectors of economies, it also looked in detail at the fuelwood crisis, which affects primarily poor people in developing countries. Governments, the Panel said, must "urgently reformulate their agricultural, energy, forestry, development and other relevant policies to stop wanton destruction of forests and make reforestation and forest-based biomass production viable and desirable activities.... Fuelwood is a basic need of rural people, policies must be developed to allow for growing trees, like food, in subsistence ways, to provide for local consumption".
Nuclear energy, said the Panel's report, "is potentially an important substitute for fossil fuels" but has a long way to go before it can be considered environmentally clean and publicly acceptable. Touching on the desirability of the development of inherently safe reactors and of research into disposal by transmutation, the report stressed a variety of measures needed if the public is to regain confidence in nuclear energy.
DEMONSTRATING A SOLAR COOKER low oil prices mean less research
