IN HIS 1939 book On the Marble Cliffs, the German soldier and scholar Ernst Jünger showed how a comfortable, complacent society could sleep-walk into catastrophe by refusing to read the signs of impending danger.

We may be nearing a Marble Cliffs moment of our own, not just in this country, but all across the developed world, in terms of the energy outlook.

Since the Second World War, the economic and social progress of the planet, for better and worse, has been heavily influenced by the policies and cultural make-up of OECD nations. That progress, if such it be, has been fuelled largely by supplies of oil and natural gas from parts of the world over which, in one way or another, OECD members have held sway.

In this process, the main supply source, Opec oil-producing countries, have with one or two aberrations maintained a moderate stance, with the result that the cost of “raw” energy has not consistently sustained its real value. A major reason for this has been the competitive force of non-Opec oil and gas production.

This comfortable world, as we have known it, is coming to a crucial turning point. And energy, specifically the cost and security of energy supply, lies at the apex of this turning point.

The components of the challenge to be faced may be familiar. There are environmental risks, specifically concerning climate change, and the costs and technological developments required to address them. There is rampant growth in new energy demand, from China and India in particular. There is the fact of depleting OECD reserves of conventional oil and gas. And there is our increasing reliance on natural gas for power generation. These problems are being addressed by energy consumers, not least in this country, in a parochial and superficial manner.

So, while some of the problems, such as Kyoto, have had much attention, others, such as the long-term security of energy supply upon which our prosperity has depended, have been neglected. Now, suddenly, new risks are appearing on the horizon. There are new dangers that could alter our quality of life over the next 20 years. They could put at risk the comfortable social order we have created for ourselves, to which most of the rest of the world has been conditioned to aspire.

A key factor in the changing balances of world energy is Russia, and the ambitions of President Putin’s country to reassert its place on the world stage by using its growing muscle as a future energy supplier to the markets of Europe and the US to recover some of the ground and status lost after the demise of the USSR. President Putin, perhaps tellingly, is reported to have described the demise of the USSR as the 20th century’s “greatest geopolitical disaster ”.

So perhaps we should heed some distant storm warnings. Perhaps we should worry when President Putin enlists support from a former German Chancellor, moments after his retreat from politics, and only months after they have, together, signed a treaty to build a gas pipeline under the Baltic, which that ex-Chancellor will supervise. Perhaps we should worry when that pipeline project will be led by an ex-boss of the East German Stasi, whom Putin met when he himself was a KGB boss.

Perhaps we should be concerned when Putin attempts to recruit a senior US presidential aide to one of the boards of Rosneft, the Russian oil company so indecently manhandled back into state control. And when Gazprom threatens to withhold gas supply from Ukraine — and, hence, indirectly from Europe — after its electoral escape from the gerrymandering of Moscow’s acolytes. And when Gazprom has declared its intention to control up to 10 per cent of the gas supply to the

US by 2015, as well as up to, if not more than, 30 per cent of the European gas market.

Perhaps we should be concerned when Russia and China seem to be coming to recognise the scale of opportunity that a strategic partnership can offer them in terms of energy security and global influence? And when the US Department of Energy forecasts that, by 2020, the annual shortfall in Opec oil production, against global demand, will exceed the biggest-ever production of Saudi Arabia, the traditional swing producer. And when we expect Canadian gas exports to the US to dwindle and shortly cease because of the need for energy for the processing of tar sands.

And perhaps we should worry when all these things are happening in such a way that we need to recognise that our affluent living standards, which we all take so for granted, may be under a greater risk now than they have ever been.

What we believe to have been the definitive triumph of the Western democratic way over the sterile misery of the Soviet system may be turning out not to have been the victorious end of the Cold War after all, but just one battle in an unending struggle for global power and influence.

The key weapon in the battle lines now being drawn is energy. Even if market forces prevail in setting costs of oil and gas, it seems clear that having so heavily depleted its own relatively low-cost hydrocarbon reserves, the OECD will have no influence over the supply or over the very much higher future costs of that supply.

There is much clamour from parochial vested interests in this country concerned with renewable energy sources and pursuit of the subsidies that are a pre-condition of their commercial viability. Environmentalists seem oblivious to the impact their theories will have on the quality of life as we know and need it. Meanwhile, European nuclear power groups are negotiating for the UK power market to be tilted in their favour and threaten to compromise the Government’s latest energy review.

Yet these other hugely important matters attract too little discussion, too little debate.

David Montagu-Smith is an independent adviser on international energy issues

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