Here's the latest in the Deep Green column from Rex Weyler - author, journalist, ecologist and long-time Greenpeace trouble-maker. The opinions here are his own.

As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.

Oil is a fixed asset of the planet, representing stored sunlight accumulated over a billion years as early marine algae, and other marine organisms (not dinosaurs) captured solar energy, formed carbon bonds, gathered nutrients, died, sank to the ocean floors, and lay buried under eons of sediment. Like any fixed non-renewable resource, oil is limited, and its consumption will rise, peak, and decline.

What do you do when oil prices rocket?

1. Swap the car for public transport?
2. Burn more energy to extract oil from sand while leaving behind toxic wastelands?

Well, if you are Syncrude Canada Ltd operating near Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, Canada, you choose option B. But since Greenpeace would rather go ahead with option A; we decided to show Syncrude how wrong their tar sands project really is.

Canada's Tar Sands project has been suffering from a bit of a PR problem, what with it being one of the most ludicrous and environmentally catastrophic schemes ever to have occurred to humankind and all.

(If you haven't heard of it yet, the plan is to extract crude oil from bituminous sand and clay in Northern Alberta. To produce one barrel of oil, up to four tonnes of rock and soil - plus the pristine boreal forest on top of it - need to be removed and four barrels of surface and ground water need to be used. The process is so energy intensive that tar sands produce up to five times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil.)

"You have to act quickly, because very soon these fields will be dry." This prediction, drawled by hardened oilman Daniel Plainview in this year's best film, There Will Be Blood, has become a reality. Eight years into the 21st century and we are seeing the beginnings of a new energy horizon. Oil is receding into the distance. Nature's "free gift" to humanity is running out, fast.

2008 will come to be seen as the year the world's leaders were forced to confront their demons. The global response to stratospheric oil prices will determine if we are able to escape the worst consequences of climate change, feed the world and prevent pollution from ruining living conditions in our ever expanding cities. Trillions of dollars will be spent in the next few decades on technologies to generate energy, as old infrastructure rusts and economies expand in parts of the world that have endured poverty for centuries.

It's long been known that energy giant ExxonMobil has been pumping money into organisations and think tanks which have spread confusion and doubt about climate change. Our own ExxonSecrets project has been exposing the links between the company and these outspoken bodies for several years.

Some bad news from our Nordic office: around 4000 tonnes of raw oil has leaked into the North Sea, in the second largest oil spill in Norwegian history.

25,000 barrels-worth of oil leaked into a key herring and mackerel ground and is now drifting northwards. The waves are too high for any oil lenses to work, and a lot of the oil's being washed underwater.

The accident happened when a pipe broke during the loading of oil from the Statfjod A platform in bad weather.

There's more on Reuters.

This claim to Antarctic land epitomises the government's lack of a coherent approach to tackling climate change.

In April, the British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, took climate change to the UN security council for the first time. Of major concern of the government, she said, were the expected "major changes to the world's physical landmass during this century," that would result from unabated climate change. It is a bitter irony, therefore, that it should now be that same British Foreign Office that is trying to profit from the melting ice of Antarctica and exploit precisely the changes to the world's landmasses that Beckett warned us about.

After twenty years out of fashion, the term 'cold war' has become the hot favourite in Fleet Street once more. Not just because diplomatic relations between Russia and the UK distinctly frosty at the moment, but Russia's current Arctic adventures are lowering the temperature even further.