For all the headache the oncoming recession promises the average citizen, there remains the hope that, at most, a few years of market recalibration should see us through. Yet, with attention diverted, we seem to forget too quickly, that there is an even more worrying financial catastrophe well in the making. The spike in oil prices has, for the short-term , been averted. Yet its fall from its $147 peak to its current standing of $69 must not allow us to close our eyes. We have a resource crisis that demands our immediate attention.

The 2nd Gulf stands as unique. It was the first war of globalisation fought primarily for resources. The last century saw some international wars for ideology, others for alliances. Yet Alan Greenspan’s admission that the key to the Iraq invasion was oil allows us to discuss the glaringly obvious. In the wake of the worsening climate, such resource wars are likely to become ever more common. With an erratic water supply, dwindling energy commodities and rapid class shifts in the two most populous nations on earth, China and India, demand has begun to outstrip supply. In what is essentially a bad maths equation, we are allowing finite resources to be consumed at a linear rate.

This would be, perhaps, morally excusable were we faced with the threat now, with no pre-warning. Yet that is hardly the case. Text book examples made 10 year old students in the early 90s aware of the dangers of deforestation. Two decades later no significant solution has been advanced to protect our carbon sinks. Renewable fuels have long been on the agenda. Yet the conversion of wind and solar energy has never been funded seriously enough. We remain where we were on the Hydrogen battery. There was progress on the Montreal Protocol which cut down on CFC usage drastically. However we took steps backward when Bush refused to ratify Kyoto.

We tend to act despondently, as if we have hit the very limits of science itself – but that simply isn’t true. There are answers. The problem is that those answers seem to have never been translated out of primary school books into the world of hard policy. The fact that we have ignored our R&D on this issue is directly attributable to the will of our political masters. The intellectual power that obtained for us advances in our Quality of Life should, thereafter, have been channelled on towards long-term thinking. The discipline of engineering, the most critical discipline in this battle against resource shortage, is currently in disarray. Highly skilled unemployed engineers are a penny a dozen in England. Some pop up as gardeners, others as postmen. Technology graduates should come straight out of university and go directly into government funded research cells. Do you know how the US got into space? Kennedy wanted to get one over on Kruschev and poured the funds in. When we want something badly enough, we get it.

Let us put the argument in economically more sobering terms. In any purchase transaction there are three participants. The buyer and the seller are directly affected by the exchange. Society picks up the tabs for any externalities. It is these very externalities that responsible, democratically elected, transparent governments are supposed to deal with. Consider the automobile. Lauded as perhaps engineering’s greatest invention, it may also be its greatest failure. The manufacturer and the consumer may well be thrilled with the benefit afforded by the car. Yet the mass pollution generated has no small part to play on the erosion of Nature’s protection barrier, leaving us alone to bare the elements. Why have governments not been willing to fund, promote and educate us on the issue? Tied down by business, they remain unwilling to chide the electorate into more responsible transport behaviour. Both in UK and US public transport should have been invested in and made the norm long ago. Car-pooling should have been promoted. Limits to one car one family should have been enacted. Petrol rationing, such as is found in Iran, should have been enforced. The automobile is only one example, but perhaps the most resonant Western motif signifying our wanton misuse of this planet. Symbolising the freedom of transport, we have allowed ourselves to be seduced into the belief that a car is an individual’s right. How, on earth (pun intended), can we justify this? In a congested world, we have to give way. After all, the law of the road is supposed to be different from the law of the jungle.