The World in 2030

170 The World in 2030
Four major Eurasian energy developments during
March have set off alarm bells inside the Beltway.
First, Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany,
the leader of that country’s former Communist Party,
revealed March 12 that his country would throw
its support behind a plan to pump Russian gas via
Turkey to Europe, instead of joining fellow European
Union states in backing the much-delayed Nabucco
gas pipeline project.
The Russian route would utilize an already existing
pipeline, known as Blue Stream, which transports gas
between Russia and Turkey under the Black Sea. 323
Because energy is such a deeply political issue in most
countries, governments control the generation, importation
and supply of energy to industry, business and consumers.
The two notable exceptions to national and semi-national
energy monopolies are Britain and, to a lesser extent, the
United States. Britain began privatising energy utilities in
the 1980s. As economist Professor Dieter Helm 324 of Oxford
University explains in his 2004 book, ‘Energy, the State, and
the Market: British Energy Policy Since 1979’:
The transformation of Britain’s energy policy in the
last two decades has been more radical than any such
change in developed economies. Since 1979 the great
state energy monopolies created after the Second
World War have been privatised and made subject
to competition.