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December 30, 2009

Book Review: Energy And Climate Change: Europe At The Crossroads By David Buchan: Published By The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies

By Barney Smith

The outcome of the Copenhagen conference may make it timely to review David Buchan’s ambitious attempt to analyse the recent history of the energy policy of the European Union (EU). The book is not an easy read, but this is not an easy subject. Buchan makes a good fist of explaining the three interlocking aspects of energy policy: the liberalisation of energy markets, the security of energy supply and climate change. Each of the three issues is complicated enough in itself but making sense of the trade-offs between them is like playing three-dimensional chess.

And this is three-dimensional chess spiced up with an arcane dispute about who has the right to move the chess-pieces, reflecting the eternal Brussels tension between the interests of the different member states on the one hand and the interests of Europe as a whole. For as the book makes clear, the EU’s ability to speak with one voice in the energy sector varies considerably according to which of these three issues is involved.

Buchan, as a former head of the Financial Times Bureau in...