The industrial nations have undertaken a number of programs designed to reduce their dependence on fossil fuel, and in part this has been a response to their dependence on oil from unstable areas such as the Middle East. The impetus for this came first from the oil shortages of the early 1970s, shortages which reminded the West how fragile its relations with the oil-producing nations could be and how much international relations were coming to depend on oil. As a result, the Western nations undertook a program to reduce oil consumption, with some success. Automobiles were made smaller and more efficient, and increases in the price of oil and gasoline helped reduce consumption to a degree as well. However, reducing the use of oil is only part of reducing dependence on oil from a specific region, and the Middle East remains the region providing the most oil for use in the industrialized nations of the West today. Such efforts are only the beginning of a massive restructuring, a reshaping of the national and even international infrastructures by which nations conduct their business and provide for their populations. The world reacted first to the energy crisis in the 1970s by developing a variety of programs that would address the issue of energy consumption and acquisition, and these programs often increased the role of government in regulating the supply and demand of energy. In the 1980s, various developed, developing, and former Communist-bloc nations expanded the role of competition and private ownership in their economies for the same reasons. In the 1990s, governments are sorting through their earlier efforts and are increasingly deregulating, privatizing, and restructuring their basic infrastructure, especially energy-related industries, in an attempt to bring their ability to provide energy and their consumption of energy into conjunction.
The underlying need is for increased energy supply, especially electricity, and...