Comment: The release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere must be having a soporific effect on mankind.

What else can explain why we are sleeping while our scientists present ever starker analysis and calls for action about climate change? We seem to be blissfully unaware of the scale of changes we are going to have to make to turn back the dial on our planet's heating system.

The entry into force of the Kyoto protocol this week should have been a real wake-up call for everyone. Unfortunately, the market mechanisms it set up may lull us back into a false sense of security rather than deliver the reductions we so urgently need.

At least some developed countries are now acknowledging that they will have to go a lot further and make real cuts of up to 70 per cent in their emissions.

Unfortunately, our own Government has declined to take any such responsibility. They will rely on buying out the Republic's limited commitments rather than making any real emission reductions.

The Government is happy to be doing something, while in truth they are ignoring the issue.

From the perspective of cute electoral politics, this might make perfect sense because the financial cost of meeting our Kyoto commitments is likely to be relatively insignificant in advance of the next election.

The European Union emissions trading system has fallen victim to similar short-term political thinking.

By giving away rather than auctioning carbon quotas, there is little or no incentive for companies to actually reduce their emissions.

Since the system came into operation in January, the traded market for these carbon credits has been down at a very low price of around €7 per tonne of CO2 emitted. Most of the Irish companies involved in the scheme will not have to pay a penny this year.

The wider Kyoto trading regime will only start in 2008, but it will follow the same format as the European system. Russia will be able to cash in the large carbon reductions they have already made in a switch from coal-fired power stations to new gas-fired plants. It will only be closer to 2012, when the Kyoto protocol is due to be reviewed, that we may start seeing higher market prices for carbon starting to have any real effect.

However, if we have to wait seven years to make any necessary changes, the evidence from the scientific community clearly shows that we cannot afford such a delay.

People in their early 40s will have been born when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was close to 320 parts per million.

Today, the figure is closer to 380 parts per million and the latest reports say we could trigger a process of irreversible global warming at CO2 atmospheric levels of only 400 parts per million.

Given the time lag between our burning fuel on the ground and the released carbon hitting the upper atmosphere, we may already have breached that limit.

Urgent action also makes economic sense. The changes we have to make will be more expensive and difficult to achieve when fossil fuels become expensive with the impending peak in global oil production.

The key actions will be to invest in energy conservation, new renewable energy technologies and public transport systems.

None of this should be a bad news story, but the sooner we use our remaining fossil resources to help deliver this new cleaner economy the better.

The reality is that oil has provided us with a remarkably energy-dense, transportable and easily stored fuel, which is not going to be easily replaced.

The debate will, no doubt, now return to the development of nuclear power as a solution to our climate change crisis. If such a debate is honest, I believe that it will show up this technology as being the worst solution to our problem.

As well as the risk of accidents and the irresponsibility of dumping our radioactive waste on the next 100 generations, nuclear power makes no financial or even generating sense.

It would bring us back to a centralised power system, where unreliable large plants take ages to crank into action.

Instead, we should be creating a distributed electricity system based on the output from thousands of wind, biomass, wave, tidal and other renewable energy producers.

David Goodstein, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, has estimated that it would take 10,000 new nuclear power plants to replace the energy we currently extract from fossil fuel supplies.

We simply don't have the global capital to complete such a task and even if we could, we would only have enough uranium to power the system for a decade or two.

We need to return first to the energy conservation policies that were started in the 1970s but were abandoned in the 1980s as oil prices fell again.

A carbon tax would provide the perfect stimulus for such a change in every section of our economy. We will also need to introduce a new global mechanism where every person on the planet is allocated an equal carbon quota to be used or traded in an equitable manner.

In the meantime, I believe that the public wants to start making real rather than token cuts in pollution levels. It is time that the West awakes.

Eamon Ryan is Green Party energy and enterprise, trade and employment spokesperson