It has long been said we are addicted to oil. Like the tobacco companies before them, oil giants don’t publicly admit to addiction, though privately they love it. But oil is only the delivery mechanism for our drug of choice – like a needle is to heroin – oil is to our drug: energy. The average British resident has access to the same energy that a chain-gang of 25 salves could deliver. It means we don’t have to walk to work, we can have cooked dinners, and zone out to X-factor at the end of the day. We can be confortable in our houses year round without wearing twenty-five knitted sweaters because of the energy available to us, and  once or twice a year we can go and fry our skin off somewhere near the Mediterranean.

This addiction – the energy addiction – is driving our debates over the future of energy. You can be an advocate of renewables, happy to cover 10% of the UK in wind turbines; or you can support nuclear, or point towards the possibilities of capturing all the pollutants from coal-fired power stations and sweeping them under the North Sea. But each of these viewpoints depends on an assumption: we need the energy!

It is an unfortunate assumption because if true each of these viewpoints isn’t valid. Take wind power: cover 10% of the UK surface (the windiest, and often the most beautiful) and we can just about cover our electricity demand ‘on average’; there will still be the issues of dealing with the mis-match between when the energy is available and when we want it. What about nuclear? It does its job in small quantities, but if world electricity production were transferred totally to Nuclear we would run out of Uranium in approximately 20 years. Similar holes can be picked in any argument that rest on continued use of energy.

The nub of the matter is this: if we keep demanding energy at our current rate the planet will be stuffed one way or another, end of story. That doesn’t even begin to consider the huge mass of humanity who have so far missed out on the benefits of the energy revolution. As the populations of China, India, South America and Africa begin to demand equality the impossibility of carrying on with our addiction becomes more apparent.

The only solution is to reduce our energy usage.  And turning your TV off standby will not cover it. Making any of the proposed energy solutions viable requires reducing our energy usage to a fraction of its current level; say 20% of 2010 levels. What does that mean? It means this: globalisation is off; no more holidays outside the UK; super-hyper efficient negative carbon insulated homes;  living within walking distance of work; eating only what can be grown locally.

Have you taken that in? To become sustainable, we cannot just put up a few wind turbines, or even a few thousand wind turbines. We need to massively change how society works. This isn’t a message many people want to hear. Well, by that I mean many folk in the UK or America, although I’m willing to bet that if you sat down a group of villagers in Sudan and said ‘we in Europe are going to give up our cars and stop flying over to the States to tell everyone how badly off people are in Sudan’ those villagers may not be too upset.

Energy efficiency isn’t near the top of the agenda for our politicians today. It isn’t even on the agenda. Why? Because it has nothing to offer the budding statesman. Energy efficiency is seen to mean less demand for energy, less demand for energy-infrastructure like wind turbines, and less demand  for business. In a nut shell: negative growth. No politician to date has got anywhere near power with a negative growth agenda. Alex Salmond’s recent claim that Scotland can provide 100% of its electricity from renewables in 9 years is testimony to the fact that to politicians, greenness means growth with its appeal of promising jobs and prosperity. There is a need to build more turbines, and I’m all for them being built in Scotland, growing Scottish businesses and giving work to people living in Scotland. But the only way to meet this target of 100% renewable electricity is to reduce Scotland energy use, and this requires a new type of economics.

There are organisations championing the ideas of zero growth societies, localising and reducing our consumption. Most of them are looked upon as something dreamed up by a bunch of hippies, but a few are beginning to break the mould. The spirit level a book about how sad we have all become in this money grabbing world has managed to reach up, even to our oh so frugal Prime Minister David Cameron.  The New Economic Foundation is another group starting to put a veneer of respectability on these no-growth economics. We need more of this. We need more scientists, economists and politicians to stop for a few hours and try totting up the numbers. They will find out that our energy addition will just not work.

When our access to our drug is restricted, our addiction may force us to raid other sources of money. We may have already entered the phase where we may break the law to secure access to our drug. In our case the law is international, and access comes from the Middle East. Like any addict it’s time for rehab.