January 2013
Energy is used for a large number of purposes: heating, transportation, industry, and all services that depend on the availability of electricity. Countries have a specific distribution of uses that varies depending on their needs (e.g. heating needs in cold countries are different from those in warmer countries) and on their economic structure (e.g. highly industrialised countries use more energy for manufacturing). Modern agriculture depends on energy, which means that sustaining the rapidly increasing population of the world is heavily dependent on affordable energy. New electronic systems, such as the Internet and cloud computing, are voracious users of energy. It has been suggested that simply reducing energy provision to about 1 600 kilowatts per individual per year (75) would reduce life expectancy by half to about 36.5 years!
Ethical considerations are integral to the formation of energy policy. This ethical analysis requires that the production systems being considered are comparable: the analysis cannot only consider economic issues, but must consider the impact, positive or negative, that may occur during the entire life cycle of the system and this should encompass the impact on the environment and the implications of the use (or, indeed, cessation of use) of a particular energy source.