ABSTRACT
Looking at the global energy budget, the previous centuries have been an era of continuous expansion in the use of energy and of various natural resources. This chapter explains about Politics in a World of Scarcity. Security and stability, understood in a radically different way from the current resource-grabbing notion, together becomes a nexus of politics in a world of scarcity. In the past centuries, the global energy budget has undergone dramatic changes, both quantitatively and qualitatively. During the twentieth century the total global primary energy supply (TPES), that is, the amount of fuel and other primary energy sources that societies have had in commercial use, has increased pretty much in lockstep with the growth of production. According to the International Energy Association (IEA), in 2010 fossil fuels accounted for over 80 per cent of all energy production. Hence, despite the introduction of new sources and technologies for energy production, fossil fuels have become ever more dominant in modern economies.
