The Fuel Crisis

This is Michael Meacher attending a FOE election hustings. Cameron wishes the Tories to be seen as being green and extremely cuddly. But underneath the propaganda are the Tories in it together or merely supporting the interests of powerful global conglomerates?

Fuel makes everything we see use or work with work.The post war has been defined and shaped by one thing...very cheap oil.

Agriculture is defined by oil. Without oil to fuel planes,trains and trucks regional, national and global sourcing of food would be impossible. The drive for cheap food to meet increasing consumer demand has been driven by big business and successfully decoupled the public from how food is produced, seasonality and moral choices. Beef production is heavy oil dependant oil to ship in massive amounts of animal feed, oil to ship beef to abattoir's and then more oil to ship the butchered products around the globe. Clearly this is insane

The coming storm will face us with hard choices on fuel, As we have seen it is a suppliers market and as India and China enter the market to feed industrialisation fuel security is a major issue. The case for swapping from hydro carbons to renewables is a no brainer.

And the UK has the largest potential supply of renewables such as windpower and wave energy in Europe. But in a quick fix many advocate nuclear power. Technically nuclear power can be classed as green...BUT there still remain major safety issues and questions about the true cost of power when decommissioning costs are added in.

Globally powerful companies and politics is a very difficult mix indeed. The Tories have to chat up big business to support their political ambition but this then undermines their ability to address climate change.

Unfettered laissez faire capitalism and progress on environmental issues do not go hand in hand at all. As Michael has pointed the collapse of neo classical economics raises an issue of what sort of system do we want to allocate scarce resources within our society?

Addressing globalisation and radically changing our economic system will be needed to address climate change. The Tories have a long way to go and other parties will be forced to make some really hard choices.

The post oil world is with us and yet we still hold on to redundant technology where we pass on a legacy of ever increasing future costs for us taking too much time in changing the ways we live. Oil profits today will be major costs that will be shackled to our grandchildren.

Unfortunately this does not make good listening to a public weary from war, recession and relentless social change. It is intresting to watch how politicians will shape public and governmental opinion to address the elephant in the living room. We need to act now