The government response is to send Gordon Brown to Saudi Arabia and ask our friends to pump more oil.

I also heard Hazel Blears the minister for the environment advising us that we maybe shouldn’t be using bio fuels any more either as they use up land needed to produce food.

The government have decided we should reduce our co2 emissions and have set themselves some difficult to achieve targets but no one asked whether any of us really care.

Surely if we were ethical and cared about the environment we would all be reducing our dependence on fossil fuel voluntarily? We would not seek out alternatives which leave the poor of the world starving as their land is used to produce bio ethanol and we would baulk at the idea of destroying huge swathes of other people’s rain forest to grow palm oil, but we don’t.

I don’t think you or any one else actually cares about the environment. Think about it fuel costs are soaring and the planet is clearly in trouble so what have you done?

Do you use your car less now than you did last year?

Is your television and DVD player unplugged to reduce energy use at home?

Did you take public transport to work today?

Did you switch of your PC monitor when you went home last night?

Just like everyone else I am willing to bet the answer to all these questions is no, we all want low fuel prices, no global warming etc but we want someone else to solve the problems.

My guess is even if fuel prices double we will keep driving and keep the heating set to 22 degrees, but at dinner parties as we open the third bottle of wine shipped from the other side of the planet we will tell our friends we are really concerned.