ABSTRACT
Decoupling energy consumption from economic growth is the foremost challenge facing the developing world, as much from the standpoint of environmental sustainability as from energy security. Despite concerted and fairly successful efforts to improve energy effi ciency, both China and India continue to tread an energy-intensive growth trajectory relative to the developed world, thanks to their low growth base that looks to be the basis for quantum leaps in future consumption. China, by virtue of its large manufacturing base (necessitated and sustained by its emerging status as the pre-eminent supplier of manufactured goods to the United States2) is tied to an energy consumption pattern that closely trails its GDP growth. India, despite its skewed economy with a disproportionate share for the service sector, has also recorded energy-demand growth rates that shadow economic growth. India’s demand is fuelled by a burgeoning and increasingly prosperous middle class attracted to the more energy intensive lifestyles sold by satellite television and overseas travel. While a striving for improved standards of living on the part of the middle class is understandable, it remains the case that India has a skewed consumption pattern, where incremental energy supplies are disproportionately consumed by the urban middle class while the remaining population continues to be energy starved.3
