Thoughts from Andrew McKillop- Speaker

THIS Aspo 5 Conference, held just as Israeli containment of Gaza's mega slum shanty town breaks out into hotter war against Lebanon - with a smallish spike up in oil prices to crown the show - is the right medecine at the right time.

My own input was initially going to solely treat the very simple fact that high oil prices push the world economy faster and further into supergrowth, feeding back as reinforced and stronger oil demand growth. But this deadly feedback is now close to busting the strained supply side of world oil; the US EIA and the OECD IEA, both of them highly opaque institutions, are doing what they can to bend and distort figures on world supply, and world oil demand, but the gap is now real - and growing. Speakers at this Conference have the numbers.

So what we need badly, but cannot have is an International Energy Transition Plan, based on compressing oil intensity in the high-energy, high-wasting countries, and a coordinated, multilateral, worldwide program for renewable energy development. This type of IETP is described in my paper to this Conference.

Andrew McKillop