If your father heads up the Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries, you might feel entitled to some favours
when you fill up your tank.

But the daughter of OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri
finds herself having to pay record high fuel prices along with
everyone else.

“My daughter calls me from Canada,” he told the Reuters
Global Energy Summit — and he tells her not to blame him.

“How much is the cost of the oil and how much are the
taxes?” he asked.

Regardless of gasoline, he said the price of unrefined
crude, which hit nearly $140 a barrel last week on international
markets, was unbearably high.

His dream was for a price that would deliver sufficient
returns for oil producers without sending the industrialised
world into turmoil.

“Oil and gas has been the backbone of all this industrial
civilisation. We don’t want to disturb that pattern. We would
like to see a reasonable price where the world will be sailing
through without any disruption,” he said.

The OPEC chief accepted the world would eventually find a
way of weaning itself off its addiction to fossil fuel.

But, hinting at the controversial biofuels that have
devoured water and land, he did not expect in his life-time to
see an alternative that did not create as many problems as it
tried to solve.

“One day there will be an end to oil, but it will take maybe
another 100 years before a renewable energy will come into the
picture that will not affect the life of a human being.”

Running an energy exchange does not necessarily make it easy
to run an energy efficient household.

The chief executive of Germany’s EEX has just bought a new
flat and, as a carbon-conscious citizen, he was eager to install
an energy efficient kitchen, with an energy efficient fridge.

He succeeded — eventually, but buying it was easier said
than done as salesman after salesman proved unable to give
the right advice.

“I was shocked by the levels of incompetence on that
question,” Hans-Bernd Menzel told the Reuters Global Energy
Summit.

He was particularly unimpressed because for many years it
has been more cost-effective over the longer term to invest in an expensive, but
efficient fridge, rather than to buy a cheap wasteful one.

“Around 15 years ago, I had the same question … The
question of power consumption was already an issue.”

In other areas, there has been progress.

When he first asked his bank if it could buy him carbon
certificates, “it was completely frustrated,” Menzel said.

Now any German citizen wanting to invest in the certificates
used for offsetting carbon emissions only has to ask.

The head of one of the world’s biggest consumer bodies the
International Energy Agency, the IEA for short, has ambitions to
add an extra E to his three-letter acronym.

The IEA was set up in the 1970s to defend consumer interests
in the face of the Arab oil embargo. It still spends much of its
energy thinking about oil, but more and more it is also thinking
about the environment.

“My job is not only energy,” said Nobuo Tanaka, executive
director of the agency set up in the 1970s.

“It should be the IEEA,” he said, adding an extra e for
environment.

He was obliged to burn up a few carbon credits to travel to
London for the Reuters Energy Summit, but he does his best to
keep his carbon footprint low by walking into work at the IEA’s
headquarters on the banks of the Seine in Paris.

“I live very near the office,” he said.

He will also be banging the environment drum at the next
month’s G8 summit in his home country of Japan.

“We are making another 25 recommendations to the G8 summit
meeting for energy efficiency,” he said.