Will there be blood?

"You have to act quickly, because very soon these fields will be dry." This prediction, drawled by hardened oilman Daniel Plainview in this year's best film, There Will Be Blood, has become a reality. Eight years into the 21st century and we are seeing the beginnings of a new energy horizon. Oil is receding into the distance. Nature's "free gift" to humanity is running out, fast.

2008 will come to be seen as the year the world's leaders were forced to confront their demons. The global response to stratospheric oil prices will determine if we are able to escape the worst consequences of climate change, feed the world and prevent pollution from ruining living conditions in our ever expanding cities. Trillions of dollars will be spent in the next few decades on technologies to generate energy, as old infrastructure rusts and economies expand in parts of the world that have endured poverty for centuries.

The technologies that can deliver a low-carbon economy are viable, affordable and available today. The kind of money needed to engineer a wholesale shift to a renewable, decentralised energy system is dwarfed by the investment needed to extract oil from tar sands, pump carbon dioxide into the ground or deal with thousands of years of dangerous nuclear waste - let alone adapt to the consequences of runaway climate change. In spite of this, governments around the world are ploughing billions into the technologies of a bygone age.

Energy - used in heating and transport as well as electricity - is the single most important commodity on the planet. Gordon Brown knows this, and on Wednesday he declared that the answer to quenching Britain's irrepressible thirst for power is a massive expansion of current nuclear capacity. As he spoke, the lights were going off in Norfolk as Sizewell B shut down due to technical problems; while in France construction of a reactor (of the type that EDF wants to sell to Britain) was halted for safety reasons.

Meanwhile, outside Downing Street, a handful of lorry drivers fought to protect their carbon intensive, often inefficient businesses. The political pressure caused by this flashback to the early Blair years caused the government to blink (just as it did in 2000), and consider reversing the increase in fuel duty that was promised in April and then deferred to October.

And, just yesterday, the prime minister made an impassioned plea to the 21st century's real powerbrokers, the leaders of OPEC. He demanded they pump a few extra million barrels of oil as a means of providing some relief to the world's stuttering economies. For the leader of a nation to publicly declare himself so unashamedly at the mercy of another is shocking. Impassioned, hysterical pleading, as every slighted lover knows, is the last resort of the desperate.

The energy crunch is of our own making. By refusing to embrace new technologies early on, the UK is now dangerously behind its European neighbours in areas like energy efficiency, decentralised energy and renewables. The German renewable energy sector now generates more power than our entire nuclear fleet. In the time it would take us to build a new nuclear power station they will have added gigawatts more. In the time it takes to read this blog, a German installer has probably bolted another few solar energy systems onto another few roofs.

Instead of planning for the future, the government has sat on its hands until the only answer is to repeat the nuclear clarion call in the hope that the public will accept it as an unfortunate, but necessary evil. As experience has shown time and again, expensive, dangerous and unreliable nuclear reactors are not the answer to climate change. Instead, the transition to a zero carbon age will require true vision, political will and massive amounts of courage - qualities Daniel Plainview and his real life contemporaries had in spades.