The European Energy System Moving to a Competitive Low-Carbon Economy

The main object of this booklet is to provide to non-specialists the necessary information on the current energy situation and its effective management, thus helping the general public understand and participate in the decision making processes related to climate issues, environmental effects and sustainability aspects. At present, the situation on the use of energy is quite different in the OECD countries, like the European ones and the non-OECD countries. While in countries like China and India, the use of energy is expected to grow intensively, in the case of Europe, on the contrary, energy use is estimated to slowly decrease. Consequently, this report will focus mainly on the European situation. It is interesting to remark first that although the European economy represents about 22% of the world economy, Europe's emissions account for only 11%. However, it is an unfortunate fact that the influence of carbon emissions on global climate change is practically independent of the location where the emissions originate.