Is the emphasis ensuring supply flows for the end user (read: state, economy, individual) a result of Smithian assumptions or one generated b/c of the very nature of question arising in the first place, ie. concerns from the club of industrialising economies hungry for raw materials?
No, because it is not merely about consumption alone, it is also about the nation-state and economic power - without energy the economy cannot function and grow. Without oil the military complex cannot run. So the quest for energy goes all the way back to the famous example of the British converting their ships to run on oil, as popularized by Yergin.
And for those who put an emphasis on getting the prices right, finding a market equilibrium at which both buyers and sellers can be happy - what are the flaws/oversights/ in this argument? (1) political (2) technical (3) economic (4) environmental? The last 3 are mostly problems to do with quantification and uncertainty because of changes over time and an inability to map reality accurately. Related to the last point is (1), that political barriers, read transition costs, read vested interests are difficult to overcome. Most importantly, the assumption of rational behaviour simply cannot be transplanted onto humans whose value systems and drivers do not necessarily correspond to the rational European-built model. Ethnocentricity.
Putting horses before carts.
Now this has become less a chapter on ENSec and one much more academic.
Energy Security - from the viewpoint of the producer . The problem is at least two-fold => (1) getting sufficient energy supplies for oneself, which would seem easy enough, if not complicated by actual facts on the ground, from the paradigmic petrostate to its variants, (2) finding suitable partners to exploit local resources, finding export markets for energy products, setting up an investment regime that 'works' (and for whose interest?). The resource curse issue in fact complicates matters a great deal. If we can ignore the debate on the reasons behind resource curses vs. misrule by elites, etc.etc argument and just focus on the outcomes of resource curses for the time being - energy security becomes simply one issue in a whole range of other 'needs' tied into problems of development - the most basic being government capacity, public goods provision, industrial policy, DEBT. These MUST not be forgotten, as is the tendency of energy security 'experts' to forget that a whole other world exists out there that affects decisions made on energy. But how do we pay credence to such concerns without alienating the energy specialist audience.
Answer - we will have to do a separate case study that goes into greater depth about how all these particular issues are intertwined in the real world.
