The Outlook on Peak Oil and Copenhagen

Today marks the second installment of Big Think’s new series on business sustainability, sponsored by Logica. For the next eleven Mondays (through June 8, 2010), we will release in-depth discussions with top European experts focusing on how we can better align the interests of business with the greater social good. Today we share clips from our interviews with the Chairman of Nestle, Peter Brabeck, and the Chief Economist at the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol.Birol thinks we’ll hit peak oil in 2020. What should businesses do to prepare for that day? Two things: invest to find new oil fields, and slow the oil demand growth. Translation: we need to start using more efficient automobiles. If we can do that, we may be able to postpone the peak.

Brabeck talks about the Copenhagen Climate Council, which was widely considered a failure. But to the Chairman of Nestle, it wasn’t a failure of ideas; it was a political failure. The issue of climate change has become far too politicized: what was presented at the Council as a primarily carbon issue is so much more than that. Brabeck gives some ideas as to how to remove the politics from the debate.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons, user Magnus Manske.