Roger.Hicks@spaceship-earth.de
The current fuel crisis should prompt us all to re-think our destructive dependency on oil
SIR - Instead of whingeing over the price of fuel and condemning the amount of tax on it, we would do better to remind ourselves that petroleum is a non-renewable resource that, because of our criminally extravagant use of it, will not only run out before today's children reach retirement, but is also changing the composition of the atmosphere and threatening the stability of our planet's life-supporting ecosystems [Tax is the real scandal, Opinion, 10 September 2000].
Although very few people are able or prepared to face up to it, our whole civilisation is built on sand - ie on the oil that is contained in it.
But unless we do face up to this extremely important fact very soon, and set about replacing the unsound foundations on which our current non-sustainable economy is based, future generations are going to curse us for our selfishness and stupidity in causing the biggest calamity in human history.
I ask myself what you at the Telegraph, Britain's largest serious newspaper, consider more worthy of conservation: the status quo of non-sustainable economics and lifestyles, or the life-supporting ecosystems of our planet, on which we and coming generations depend for survival?
Judging by the Comment and Opinion expressed in the last Sunday Telegraph, I can only assume that it is the former.
