So far, though, EVs have massively failed to live up to the hype. Fewer than 700 were registered in the first half of 2011 – and it is a fair bet that the majority of those were demonstrators of one kind or another.

“Range anxiety” is the chief stumbling block, although you could also call it “power paranoia”, since buyers also worry about the enormous cost of replacing worn-out batteries and current shortage of charging points.

EVs might emit nothing at the tailpipe but they are followed around by a very thick cloud of bad press. No-one should be surprised to see Jeremy Clarkson bad-mouthing the range of a Nissan Leaf but these cars struggle to ignite a spark of praise from the most even-handed journalist.

The makers have only themselves to blame, having oversold EVs’ capabilities by majoring on claims that they can cover 100 miles on a single charge when the reality, in all but ideal conditions, is nearer 75.

The question is why did they do this? To me it seems clear that the car makers are in a very difficult position. EVs are OK in cities. Or for a 30-mile-a-day commuter who can rely on trickle-charging the battery every night. But that’s all. They’re a niche product. More or less a lifestyle accessory for the well-off.

Which, of course, is what cars were before cheap petrol and massive rates of fossil-fuelled economic growth made mass motoring possible.

Do they even make a profit? Even at £30,000 a throw, possibly not. But the car makers have no choice but to press ahead. The writing is on the wall for internal combustion-engined vehicles due to peak oil, although the timing and trajectory of conventional cars’ demise is still anyone’s guess.

I think that trying to market EVs as electrified copies of ordinary cars is a dead end. Current electric lookalikes such as the Leaf don’t stack up practically, financially or environmentally. They offer a fraction of a normal car’s range for three times the cost and, when you take into account the fossil fuels used to generate electricity, they still have the carbon footprint of an average family saloon.

They look like they’re trying to do what other cars do; only they can’t. Why buy one? The public can’t think of a reason.

Meanwhile, you have BMW waiting in the wings with its city car concept. Ultra lightweight carbon fibre body. The battery as an integral member of the separate chassis. Designed and marketed as a mobility solution for well-heeled urbanites.

How will those who can’t afford one, or who need to travel more than 50 miles to get to work, get around? Well, after they’ve gone through downsizing their diesel car, then car sharing, the answer is who knows?

EVs represent the future of motoring but it won’t be a continuation of today’s way of driving. It will be something else entirely and for the car makers, the stakes are very high indeed.

Forget the money, the commerce, the promises: the sport is all that matters here

Sometimes you have to cut through the cynicism and soullessness of modern sport and remember that it is fundamentally brilliant.

…

Remember the one, inviolable reason for retaining the Olympic track and stadium in some form. And it is not money, commerce or promises, but sport.

The paper is shooting for the verbal stars over a suggestion that a football club might sell its existing home, knock down the 2012 stadium and build itself a new soccer ground in its place.

It wants to do that to make money – which is exactly what 99.9% of all people involved in 2012 want to do. Perfectly good plan, too. Will Britain need an Olympic stadium after the Olympics? No. Will a spare stadium in London screw things up for Crystal Palace, the current ‘home’ of athletics? Yes.

To drive home the anguish that future generations will suffer if the stadium is chopped up and recycled, the author refers us to Atlanta where the 1996 Games stadium is now a baseball ground.

“The memory of Michael Johnson’s mesmerising 200 metres will have to stay just that.”

OMG! You mean if the Atlanta track was still there you could go along and it would be like Johnson was THERE running the race every time! Johnson was a good pick, though, as unlike so many sporting heroes he’s never tested positive for drugs (although he returned his 2000 4x400m relay gold medal after the rest of the squad admitted they’d used them).

What is sport about these days, if not about money? If the Olympics was really all about competing for personal fulfilment and national pride, why do the sports men and women need to be encased in a multi £ billion carapace of construction, sponsorship, TV rights and all the other paraphernalia of big league mass entertainment?

Even one of the 2012 venues looks like a fallen satellite dish. The only “brilliant” thing about sports coverage in relation to megabuck jamborees like the Olympics is the entertainingly stupid level of hyperbole and breast beating it draws forth from commentators.

Prior to visiting Germany last month, he wrote an editorial for the Süddeutsche Zeitung proposing a free trade zone stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok “or even more advanced forms of integration.”

Mr Putin’s proposal didn’t receive much airplay in the UK but it was picked up by Yale professor Immanuel Wallerstein for his latest fortnightly commentary, “Mr Putin Makes an Audacious Offer”.

Rather than simply exchanging Russian energy for European cash, Mr Putin wants to trade things of real value, such as industrial development, knowledge, logistics and energy itself. North Sea wind generation for Siberian gas perhaps.

Both sides have much to gain or lose here. The world’s net fossil energy supply is about to peak, if it hasn’t already done so. Russia’s energy resources are gaining in scarcity value but paper money is becoming increasingly worthless as a means to pay for them.

Mr Putin can see which way the wind is blowing. He’s offering Europe a bilateral deal on energy and industrial technology in the same way the Chinese have been offering investment-for-food deals to African countries.

He has chosen his timing well. Europe is broke; broke enough to lose some of its fear of the US. The US is even more broke. It still owns the world’s reserve currency but the end of energy growth undercuts the foundations of dollar hegemony. In short, the US no longer holds the killer combination of a big stick and a big bankroll to wave at potential secessionists.

Europe can’t afford to sit on the fence for long. The US has the bulk of the world’s oil reserves sewn up in the Middle East and can, for a decade or two perhaps, count on its shale gas to support its domestic power generation needs. Putin is offering an oil and gas lifeline that Europe can pay for constructively (although the asking price will doubtless be far too high for comfort for Europe’s leaders).

Strategically, his proposal would take the ‘R’ out of the BRIC bloc. The world would become tri-polar: the US, ‘Eurussia’ and the (for now) developing markets of Brazil, India and China.

This makes no sense viewed in terms of conventional expectations of endless economic growth. But staying on the path to globalised gigantism requires energy resources that no longer exist at low-enough prices.

Increased localism will be the way of the future. The emergence of Eurussia could be a key step in that direction.

As Wallerstein says:

“[Mr Putin’s overture] seems a quite specific attempt to encourage a strengthening of ties with Europe at the expense of the United States. While this is not entirely new in terms of Russia’s geopolitical stance, it has up to now not been stated so publicly and so boldly.

“This open diplomacy by Putin should probably worry U.S. leaders more than the modest revelations of WikiLeaks.”

Here’s a chart from the Department of Energy and Climate Change, showing where the UK’s oil comes from.

This is the most up-to-date version available. If you’d compared it to the 2006 chart, you’d see that the share of oil from UK and Norway had fallen, while Russia and Africa had increased exports to us to fill the gap.

Africa?

Perhaps this makes it a little clearer.

Libya increased its oil exports to the UK several times over during the last three years and currently accounts for between 6% and 10% of our supply. It’s not exactly a stranglehold on the UK economy but it’s enough for a sudden interruption to create awkward problems.

Oddly, the ‘O’ word was almost entirely absent from this morning’s BBC Today programme and missing from the main story on the BBC website about the latest Wikileaks revelations about Libya and the lead-up to the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

Today reported that one of the trade deals supposedly threatened by Libya was a £1 billion investment in oil exploration, by BP. But that’s us investing in them (albeit in a somewhat having-our-arms-twisted kind of way).

Does delaying inward investment count as ‘thuggish behaviour’ nowadays? Would it have ‘cut Britain off at its knees’?

Or has the BBC chosen to tiptoe around the issue of what you could call the UK’s increasing ‘energy independence deficit’ and its consequences for foreign policy?

Look again at the chart. Two countries have the power to take one in five vehicles off our roads in a matter of weeks. The thin sliver marked ‘Middle East’ may look like a cushion of safety, since there’s a lot more oil there than in Libya and they might sell some to us to cover the gap. But there are serious doubts about the real level of spare capacity there.

And those who think that al-Megrahi was a political fall guy in the first place will note that the chief suspect country in the Lockerbie case – one that had both the motive and the opportunity -also happens to be in the Middle East and not North Africa (although it’s not itself a major oil producer).

Anyway, kudos to the diplomat who recorded that Libya had got Britain ‘between a rock and a hard place’. If he’d said ‘over a barrel’ it would have been so much harder for some of the media to gloss over one of the most important and obvious elements in this story.

Which was odd, since Mr Bernanke’s appearance on Capitol Hill was replete with all the usual certainties.

It’s pretty certain that Mr Benanke has got the economics of money back to front. Once again, he showed that he has.

It’s pretty certain that some of Mr Bernanke’s ideas about causes and effects seem to come from Plant Bizarre. Blaming Greece (GDP 2.6% of America’s) for the US’s woes would seem to fall into that category.

Ben also blames the banks while bending over backwards to help them out at Main Street’s expense. It’s pretty certain that he hasn’t learned the lesson of the Great Depression, which was that things only started to turn round after the Government finally sided with the people, leaving the banksters to nurse their broken teeth and smashed fingers for a few decades.

Or maybe he does understand the lesson. Perhaps his idea is to keep the looting of Americans’ wealth going full pelt right up to the moment when the whole of US society is teetering on the brink of the abyss. By that time, the elites will be set up for generations – never mind just for life.

They’ll be able to ride out peak oil, peak water, peak food and peak population quite happily, thank you. Been there; done that dozens of times over the past 3,000 years.

Even if the worst came to the worst and the natural reaction to human overshoot catapulted society back to wood-fueled feudalism, Mr B would retain his place at the top table near the big fireplace. And when he studied the arrangement of fish bones on his platter and pronounced that the outlook was “unusually uncertain”, the traders and villagers outside the castle walls would gather their rags more tightly around them and shiver.

But it’s hard to whip up any enthusiasm for a process where all the big issues are ignored by the politicians and the media, and the people’s votes will have little bearing on the outcome.

I live in a safe Conservative seat. Any vote I cast, other than Tory, is merely a gesture: it won’t change who gets elected.

At present, the flea-bitten carcase of Gordon Brown’s Government is trailing badly in the polls, with little more than a quarter of people offering it their vote. That wouldn’t stop it forming the largest block of MPs after next week’s election, albeit not an overall majority.

One, two, three, what are we voting for? That’s democracy, UK-style after 40 years of gerrymandering and creeping disenfranchisement of the electorate.

And what issues are we voting on? Not the budget deficit or how the UK will cope with rising energy costs as the increase worldwide liquid fossil fuel production finally cracks and turns in a few years’ time.

None of the parties’ energy and climate spokesmen showed any grasp of the facts of peak oil in their debate last week, let alone their ramifications for an over-indebted country that’s highly dependent on high quality energy to maintain its consumer economy and trading links.

The End of Growth, at least for the mature and highly complex economies of Europe, is just around the corner. The UK needs so much high quality energy per capita just to stand still that it cannot compete with emerging economies like China.

China has gratefully received every bit of manufacturing kit and know-how that we’ve sent their way. With lower per-capita energy needs, China will get far more bangs per barrel out of its energy imports than us.

Obviously, with customers like the UK shivering and broke, China won’t be growing at 11% a year in future but neither will it be in the dire straits awaiting the Brits.

For over 30 years, successive UK Governments have overseen a massive transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes to a small elite who, like their money, are highly mobile and international. At the first sign of trouble, they’ll be off to a lofty perch in Dubai to plan where to go after the rubble stops bouncing.

Meanwhile, back in Blighty, the baby boomers, who belatedly realise that they were bought off with promises as long as they turned a blind eye to the daylight robbery of their descendants, will go to cash-in those pledges only to find that their pensions and investments are worthless.

As net energy declines, there’s little likelihood that we’ll turn that situation round, as happened in the 1970s, and get back to happy motoring, granite worktops and cheap flights to Australia and Florida.

For all the talk of renewables and nuclear power, it’s clear that Britain is relying on gas to plug the electricity generating gap in the second half of the decade. With the North Sea past peak, we’ll be dependent on natural gas piped from the other side of Russia and LNG shipped from the Gulf.

What will that cost? Will we be able to afford to outbid all the other countries who want a slice of those cakes?

All this assumes that Jan Lundberg is incorrect in his prediction that the oil industry and markets are structurally incapable of delivering a managed decline in production and will, instead, quickly collapse post-peak.

Let’s assume they will prove more resilient. That will still leave a complex society like the UK facing what John Michael Greer calls catabolic collapse. That’s where complexity gives way in a series of steps over decades or hundreds of years.

You could call catabolic collapse “stages of austerity”. Which of the would-be national leaders in tonight’s TV debate is going to utter the ‘A’ word?

None of them. All of them know the pickle we’re in. None of them will level with the electorate.

So fuck you Brown. Fuck you Cameron. Fuck you Clegg. Whichever of you gets in, we’ll have ended up voting for the same Government that’s been driving us towards the cliff edge for the past 30 years. Thanks.

It’s rare for the BBC to spell things out too bluntly for its delicate listeners but, when the country’s as deep in the ca-ca as it is these days, even Auntie has to face the messy truth.

Radio 4′s history of the credit card – Archive on 4, Flexible Friend or Foe – yesterday concluded, with un-Beeb-like frankness:

It’s far too late to go back. Every decade, the average credit card liability jumps by far more than inflation. Last month, it was more than £3,000 per cardholder in the UK.

So the lesson from the history of the credit card is simple: we’re trapped. If we all cut up our credit cards, the entire economy would collapse. But if we keep spending, we can cling on to our jobs, houses and cars…whatever the cost.

Of course, the cost is more and more people falling into abject debt-slavery until the remaining number who’re still credit-worthy is no longer capable of holding up the humongous inverted pyramid of debt. At that point, the economy crashes and burns anyway.

And credit card debt is only a small segment of the pyramid. Add other unsecured personal borrowing; too-high mortgages on overpriced houses; corporate debt and public sector debt and you get an absolutely unsustainable situation. Yet, as the programme says, the only plan on the table is to keep growing debt in the UK exponentially.

Except we can’t do that. Not on our own at least. We will have to rely on foreigners to lend us the money. But there are precious few other countries that aren’t already in the same boat as us. And the remaining handful of solvent lenders (think oil producers rather than the over-hyped Chinese) will want a very good reason to put Sterling debt before Dollars or Euros.

That can only mean putting up interest rates. That will knock a massive tranche of UK borrowers for six – certainly enough to re-crash the economy. The impossibility of running a country on ever-increasing debt will become clear. Anything the Government does to try to stimulate – holding down internal interest rates, printing money or increasing borrowing will send overseas lenders scurrying to find better prospects. And they won’t have to look far in the buyers’ market of all time for international debt.

Will Britain’s over-borrowed households get help via debt-rescheduling plans and other workouts? Will they heck.

The BBC programme told a story of a defaulting cardholder being harassed for repayment even while they were being cared for in a hospice. Most listeners no doubt tut-tutted at the shameful nastiness of the card company. But right now we are heading unstoppably into circumstances where this treatment will be meted out to millions of borrowers, even for amounts that are trivial by today’s standards, by lenders of all types.

If you don’t believe me, believe the Australian economist Steve Keen who is widely credited with being one of only 15 major economists to accurately foretell the current worldwide financial meltdown.

If Keen is too wonkish for your taste, then try Stoneleigh’s series on deflation at The Automatic Earth.

In the meantime, if you’ve got debts you can clear, do it now. Don’t worry about the economy – it’s dead already despite sucking the life blood from the people for the best part of 40 years.

That black cloud on the horizon is the next, worse, phase of the recession/depression and you seriously don’t want to go into it with any more debt than you can possibly help.

As you would expect, nothing much has changed. The recession is supposedly over but 0.1% ‘growth’ is more of a rounding error than a recovery. The pundits are roundly unimpressed and the general reaction seems to be to ask: “Is that the best that £200bn of QE, zero interest rates, car scrappage and lowering VAT to 15% can buy?”

There do seem to be some sickly yellow shoots around. People I know who run small businesses (caution: tiny sample) report that they’re much busier than this time last year. It could be that some of the stimulus is only now making itself felt at grass roots level.

Or it could just be the normal cycle of orders and restocking – made more noticeable by the depth of the surrounding freeze. Certainly, there are millions of households just scraping along under the record burden of private debt, for whom even a small increase in interest rates would be a heavy blow.

The trouble is, it’s all downhill for the rest of the year. It’s not just the coming cessation of stimulus and the opening rounds of deficit-reduction.

Energy consumption is falling across the world. Electricity production dipped for the first time since 1945 last year. Oil production is down by two million barrels a day. Only coal is holding its own but, as the electricity figures show, that doesn’t mean much.

If the technological base of civilisation had some built-in resilience, falling energy wouldn’t be a problem. In fact it would be a good thing from the point of view of climate change, pollution and resource depletion.

Unfortunately, it isn’t resilient. The enormous overbuild of energy-hungry infrastructure across the planet – from roads to nowhere to server farms pulling as much current as a medium-sized town – doesn’t contract easily in the face of a power deficit: it breaks up.

Bits of it stop working. The process is made dramatically obvious if there are rolling blackouts, as in Pakistan and Venezuela, but it is happening more quietly in many other places. First of all, extensions and improvements are cancelled. Next, ‘inessential’ repairs are scotched, ultimately hastening the arrival of the day when roads, bridges, buildings, hospital wards and so on close for ever.

That’s what happened to Britain in the 1970s and early 80s. The country was on an energy diet as it weaned itself off suddenly-costly oil and on to gas (before weaning itself back on to cheaper oil again). At the time, people told themselves it was a recession and that things would get better.

And things did – because we had the means and the opportunity to go on a massive energy binge for nearly a quarter of a century. When the energy curve flattened-off in 2004, we didn’t stop partying, we just handed over IOUs for future cheap energy in the form of huge debts.

This time, the energy isn’t there. We’ve got the debts and the ginormous infrastructure (think Dubai on steroids) that we threw up in order to keep churning fossil energy into high living standards (just pumping and burning oil doesn’t make you rich – you need to develop massive urban and suburban infrastructure to generate the resource extraction that makes you feel wealthy).

Even if – or maybe it’s when – they cancel all the debt, the energy growth route out of depression won’t be there as it was in every previous downturn since the industrial revolution. This really will be James Howard Kunstler’s ‘Long Emergency’.

So make the most of 2010. So much of it, poor though it may feel, will still be better than every year that follows.

For some reason, only that darling of the Establishment, the Times, got the story about Heathrow’s third runway “passing the carbon test” today.

In what unquestionably qualifies as the News Story With the Most Infeasibly Large Gonads of the Year, The Times Of By and For London reports:

Climate change advisers have decided that an extensive building programme at Heathrow – including the construction of a third runway – can proceed without jeopardising the Government’s carbon emissions targets.

Those are the climate targets, by the way, that the Institution of Mechanical Engineers have worked out, in five minutes, with a slide rule and a stubby pencil, are complete bollocks.

And what’s with the “climate change advisers have decided” bit? Who are these demi-gods of the planning process? How come being a climate change adviser confers special sanction over pouring millions of tonnes of concrete that you don’t get if you’re, say, merely a town planner?

Appearing on stage in the persona of an incoherent retainer to Baron Greedypants, the chief climate change adviser burbled:

“You can see how you can do the maths and have a third runway and be within the 60 per cent limit. You could have a world where you have an extra runway at Heathrow, where you use it and where you are within that 60 per cent demand growth rate. So they are not inconsistent with each other.”

Oooh, naughty Times journalist – reporting the poor man verbatim like that. “You could have…an extra runway, where you could use it…”

Or not use it, presumably.

A lot of people believe that, by 2030, the only use for the third runway will be to park-up Jumbos made redundant by soaring fuel prices and the unwillingness/inability of the general populace to afford the cost of indulging in air travel. And the airlines will only need the third runway as an overflow park for the second runway…

Perhaps that’s going too far. Even in 2030 there’s a chance that, at times, Heathrow will be nearly as busy as it is today. But the projection of millions more air passengers by mid-century are pure fantasy.

By 2030, on even the optimists’ reckoning, a combination of resource depletion and population growth will return global per-capita amounts of liquid fossil fuels to 1930s levels. Even allowing for more efficient planes and the UK retaining some of its ability to hog more than its fair share of what goes around, this could put airlines back on to a 1960s model, if not the whole two-flights-a-week-to-Australia in a De Havilland Hercules, for very rich people only, sort of thing.

What all this boils down to is desperate developers, scared Cabinet ministers and dumb minor politicians. The developers are desperate for a project that is ‘too prestigious to pull the plug on.’ Yeah. We’ll wait and see what happens after the next oil price shock, which is looming around 2012-14.

Scared ministers just see GDP numbers. A third runway is God’s gift to GDP. Not only do you get the new build, you get all the activity of displacing and replacing an entire community’s homes, shops and school. And you get all the GDP from the, uh, ‘millions’ of passengers who will, putatively, one day land at Heathrow, get off one plane, break wind, and get on another.

Lastly, a decision that is so transparently crap that the decisioneers had to slide it into the nation’s underpants via a prepared story in a single newspaper isn’t fooling anyone.

The Times found a transport consultant, who said:

“Removing Heathrow’s capacity constraint would enable the addition of new destinations, higher frequencies, increase competition and improve reliability and punctuality. These provide benefits for business users of between £9 billion and £13 billion over a 60-year period.”

The possibility that large-scale air travel will last another 60 years is vanishingly small. By the time the concrete is dry on the new runway, it will be almost obsolete. The returns will be tiny compared to today’s projections.

Still, I daresay it will get built. The timing of the announcement was simply a big “fuck-you” to Copenhagen. Climate change is, among other things, a proxy for worldwide Governments’ growing apprehension that almost every ‘upward path’ they thought they were on – food, water, energy, so-called economic growth – actually leads down to a dead end due to the sheer planetary overload imposed by homo colossus in overshoot .

But while Copenhagen flounders towards a declaration that begins to acknowledge this dire predicament, the Heathrow lobby seem to have thought: “Fuck it. We’ll do what we want and blow CO2 up their noses while we’re at it.”

So they did. And announced it in the Times. Which, try as hard as it might, didn’t seem able to take the story seriously.

So we won’t, either.

Gregor.us puts the story eloquently into context today. In Let Them Eat Data he also asks:

But what’s particularly bizarre in today’s IEA World Energy Outlook 2009 report is that the IEA maintains their forecast of a peak in global oil supply around 2030, but now suggests Non-OPEC supply will peak next year. Sorry, you can’t have 60% of world supply peaking in 2010, and then a final global peak 20 years from now. Besides, Non-OPEC peaked five years ago, and is currently on care and maintenance.

No-one in the oil patch or the peak oil fraternity is the remotest bit surprised that the IEA has allegedly been fudging its data and conclusions for political reasons. As the President of ASPO International, Kjell Aleklett, wrote yesterday, the only surprise is that no-one blew the whistle earlier.

Now the two big questions are:

1. How much lower are the IEA’s real forecasts compared with their public position?
2. To what extent, if any, have Governments like the UK (which base their energy strategy on IEA advice) been discounting the degree of exaggeration involved?

The second question is the most interesting.

A Government that is allegedly close to the US administration, such as the UK, would surely be tipped the wink about the IEA’s risky optimism. If it was not, what is the point of having a “special relationship”?

But even if the UK was in on the game, what could it do about it? If we set energy policies based on the ‘real’ data our actions would have made it plain that we regarded the IEA’s public data as bogus.

But if we set our energy policies in line with the IEA’s public position, we were being either very gullible or prepared to screw ourselves handsomely (by not preparing sufficiently) purely in order not to rock the Anglo-US loveboat.

Everything about the UK’s economic, foreign and energy policy says we did the latter. If so, what were we promised in return? That Uncle Sam would pull us out of the economic/energy hole we were digging for ourselves? And with what? Iraqi oil?

Above: You couldn’t make it up. Actually, that’s just what they did.