Energy sovereignty

According to an Oakland Institute Report on Agrofuels, energy sovereignty stems from

“the right to democratic access and effective control over common natural resources, thereby guaranteeing communities and nations the ability to freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development, and to determine their political status.”

Governments should be finding ways towards energy sovereignty

Delegates at the first National Popular Conference on Agroenergy, held in October 2007 in Curitiba, Brazil, agreed that governments, not companies, need to drive the process of transforming current industrial patterns of energy production and consumption. Governments should find ways of achieving energy sovereignty – producing sustainable energy to meet their national needs, instead of relying on Southern countries to increase their agrofuel production for export markets, and on oil, gas and coal producing countries to extract these for export.

Instead, UK and other European governments are looking to increase energy security – a different kind of thing

The G20 economies increasingly worry about their own energy security, since major gas and oil fields in Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East are beyond their control. In order to increase European access to energy (energy security), a European Union (EU) Directive requires  EU member states to source a certain percentage of energy from biofuels. However, this policy threatens the food and energy sovereignty of emerging and poor countries, by using them as a source of biofuels. Land that small farmers grew crops on has been taken over by large corporations and turned into monocultures of biofuel crops.

Here is some information about gas pipeline shenanigans in Russia and Central Asia, which the Ambassador-at-large for energy security, Czech Republic and chief of CR’s nuclear tender for Temelin, sent to the “global intelligence” company Stratfor, via Wikileaks. The top of the linked page is in Russian (I think) but if you scroll down to the bottom, the original Stratfor document is in English.

Russian gas pipelines

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