With green talks on a road to nowhere, Eamonn Dwyer takes aim at our Faustian pact with fossil fuels.

They’re like those people who keep telling us not to add salt to our food, or guilt us for wearing a top from a sweatshop. Incessant, proscribing and one-note, they are the spoilers; the people who like to belch on our bluefin tuna before telling us why we shouldn’t be eating it in the first place. If climate change activists don’t get on your goat, that’s because you’re one of them.

You open the paper, and tut-tutting columnists lament our carbon-addled lifestyle like social workers inspecting junkies in a squat. If wouldn’t be so bad if these sanctimonious sermonisers weren’t jet-setting around the world to see global warming ‘first-hand’, or boasting about the Toyota hybrid they’ve bought when the rest of us can’t afford the fuck-off premium.

They relentlessly spew facts and figures with a rote confidence that leaves us unsure whether they’re trying to proselytise us, or audition for the pub quiz team.

And the biggest problem with these warming whingers is that they’re right. We’re cooking the planet with carbon.

What choice is there for the sentient sap in all this farrago? To be resigned to a disaster as the world gives a shrug and a dance? If I was on the Titanic, I’d rather be swigging champagne and chomping cigars than telling the cumulatively bewildered ‘I told you so’.

Climate campaigners retain niche support. Their high profile shutdown of Stansted was intended to inflame the passions of a passive public, but instead invoked the ire of irate travellers. Even the recent rooftop takeover of parliament was more Fathers4Justice prank than pièce de résistance.

Where are the climate terrorist groups? I’m not talking about suicide bombing oil refineries (though that would be a start), but at least some people who care enough to put their lives on the line. There’s a US organisation called the Earth Liberation Front who've scorched a few SUV dealerships, but their activities read more like a Daily Show sketch than a terror movement. Whence the Provo Greenpeace?

Even animal rights campaigners, the coconut of the eco-nut family, find it difficult to be catalysed into action. Don’t they realise that in 40 years global warming will have wiped out a million species? You’d expect BP shareholders to be getting poison pen letters by the sackful. Instead these simian psychos have been driven to bombs and blackmail by experiments at Huntingdon Life Sciences. The immediacy of puppies under the knife, it seems, is more motivation than the sixth great mass extinction of Earth.

The trouble is, climate change is simply not cinematic. In human terms, it’s a slow-roast; perhaps a degree every 25 years. It is diffuse in scope, long-term in effect, and as difficult to fathom as the oceanic depths it predicts.

But in geological time, it’s a nuclear flash, a split-second reaping of half the planet’s species as a two-metre wall of water sweeps across the coast of every landmass on the planet.

Human beings find it difficult to assess long-term, systemic risks. When faced with a threat we don’t understand, we take our cues from those in the know. Sadly our placating politicos are fixing fables, not finding solutions. Gordon Brown and David Cameron promise green prosperity and conserved lifestyles; turning off the lights and unplugging the DVD player will be sacrifice enough to save our ecosystem. We can cut back on carbon and renewables will plug the energy gap. It would seem supplanting our civilisation’s energy source is akin to switching a rug under a table.

Unfortunately, renewables cannot replace hydrocarbons. They either contain a fraction of the compressed power of fossil fuels or use so much energy in their manufacture that the process is a waste of time. Yes, you can run a Land Rover on ethanol, but drive it for a day and you could have fed a person for a year with the amount of corn it took to make the fuel.

Are world leaders in denial, or fearful of being ousted from office if they told the truth about what was needed?

No talk of an end to discretionary travel, or speed limits to conserve fuel. No end to lunatic airport expansion. No economic incentives to buy local food over airplane imports.

And that’s not even getting to the stuff we really need. Like carbon rationing. Like family planning to reduce our population. Like telling people our consumption economy is over.

Perhaps politicians know the brunt of the bill for the developed world’s appetite will be paid for by the developing world, and no electorate will accept impoverishing themselves to save other nations. Have a look at the International Energy Agency’s prediction for international fossil fuel consumption. Where one would expect to see a decrease in the take-up of fossil fuels, what we find is a massive acceleration.

The truth is action on climate change is discretionary, unpopular, expensive to implement, and contrary to Al Gore, extremely damaging to your economy’s health. Kiss goodbye to air travel, the motor industry, and most globalised trade. We’re not just winding the clock back 50 years; we’re decommissioning the cheap energy basis for our economy. Green power might well be an ascendant industry, but it grows alongside a thousand dying industries.

Civilisation has made a Faustian pact with fossil fuels, and has convinced itself global warming is the price to be paid for our lifestyles. The climate change circus obscures the real terms of the bargain. We have sin-eaters performing feats of offset, environmentalists carrying out moral martyrdom, and patricians weaving lush fairytales of a green future. And then there’s us, the braying audience at the side, in the petroleum-heated stalls, eating petroleum-derived food, in petroleum-created clothes made from petroleum itself.

Climate change is a dreadful side-effect, but not the true cost of our addiction. What we really exchanged was our ability to live without fossil fuels. And contrary to what governments are telling people, fossil fuels are running out fast.

According to oil expert Dr Colin Campbell, 2010 is the year of ‘Peak Oil’. It is the moment when oil production cannot match demand and enters terminal decline. Some experts say his prediction is too pessimistic; others, too optimistic, that we are already on the ‘plateau’.

The devil is at the door.

In Part II, Eamonn Dwyer will explore what Peak Oil is, and why governments and many environmentalists don’t want you know about it. Part II will be published on 22nd January.