Global Challenges on Climate Change: An Ongoing Portentous Transformation

Abstract

October 1973 marked an important turning point that paved the way toward our modern global socioeconomic system, when the members of the OPEC proclaimed the well-known oil embargo, during which oil prices rocketed from US$ 3 per barrel to about US$ 12 per barrel globally by the end of embargo in March 1974, an increase of about 400%. This embargo was coined as the “oil shock” because of its long-term effects on the global economy and geopolitics. A few years later, in the wake of the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq (1980) war, due to decreased oil output, prices rocketed again, installing a new global panic, provoking the “second oil shock.” These shocks summed up with the worldwide awakening caused by the 1972 published report of the Club of Rome titled “The Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al., 1972), presenting the results of MIT’s computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources. The message was clear: the planet cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the end of the twenty-first century because resources are finite. The result was then the waking up of an intense global awareness regarding the depletion of natural resources and the aggression to the environment (Devezas, 2008).