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a greater extent on fossil fuels. A near doubling of global primary energy consumption will be difficult without encountering severe economic, social, and environmental constraints.

13. This raises the desirability of a lower energy future, where GDP growth is not constrained but where investment effort is switched away from building more primary supply sources and put into the development and supply of highly efficient fuel-saving end-use equipment. In this way, the energy services needed by society could be supplied at much reduced levels of primary energy production. Case B in Box 7-2 allows for a 50 per cent fall in per capita primary energy consumption in industrial countries and a 30 per cent increase in developing countries. By using the most energy-efficient technologies and processes now available in all sectors of the economy, annual global per capita GDP growth rates of around 3 per cent can be achieved. This growth is at least as great as that regarded in this report as a minimum for reasonable development. But this path would require huge structural change to allow market penetration of efficient technologies, and it seems unlikely to be fully realizable by most governments during the next 40 years.

14. The crucial point about these lower, energy-efficient futures is not whether they are perfectly realizable in their proposed time frames. Fundamental political and institutional shifts are required to restructure investment potential in order to move along these lower, more energy-efficient paths.

15. The Commission believes that there is no other realistic option open to the world for the 21st century. The ideas behind tnese lower scenarios are not fanciful. Energy efficiency has already shown cost-effective results. In many industrial countries, the primary energy required to produce a unit of GDP has fallen by as much as a quarter or even a third over the last 13 years, much of it from implementing energy efficiency measures. Properly managed, efficiency measures could allow industrial nations to stabilize their primary energy consumption