Growing Risks Ahead - Energy and Climate: How to Achieve a Successful Energy Transition - page 18

A constant effort is therefore required to protect the environment. The
actions required to fight against climate change must not detract from
the measures to be taken to protect the environment at a local level.

Risks for the environment at world level

Globalisation, which favours delocalisation of production activities, also
delocalises pollution. Driven by a search for the most competitive pro-
duction conditions, firms choose to locate in geographic sectors where
environmental regulations are most lax.
Production sites concentrating polluting activities, sometimes called
'pollution havens', are set up in the developing countries. The effect of
globalisation is therefore to reduce pollution in the richest countries and
aggravate it in the developing countries [6].
Pollution tends to spread to a larger and larger scale; from local, it
becomes regional, and then global.
Formation of the 'ozone hole' over the pole, due to destruction of
tropospheric ozone by the halogenated compounds formerly used in
particular as refrigerating fluids, is a case of global pollution. The problem
was solvedbyaninternational agreementbanningtheuseof thesefluids [7].
Over the last ten years, the issue of climate change has become one of
the most worrying. Directly related to the considerable emissions of CO 2
resulting from the use of fossil fuels, it now represents the main global
pollution.
An international agreement between most of the countries concerned
must be set up to cope with this situation. The degree of difficulty in
reaching this type of agreement obviously depends on the degree of effort
required.

Growing threats

The economy s high dependency on energy consumption also generates

two major risks:

Interruption in the supply of hydrocarbons

.

The world economy has a certain amount of flexibility with respect to oil
supplies, but room for manoeuvre remains limited, especially when no