PRESENT TENSE:YOU DON'T NEED much energy to wag a finger, as we discovered following this week's study revealing the Irish population's growing use, and nonchalant waste, of energy, writes Shane Hegarty
As prices rise along with consumption, we were told that low income households face a future of 'energy poverty'.
But an unmentioned by-product of this is how, for many, the end of cheap fuel will be accompanied by a shortage of something else that's been in ready and cheap supply in recent years: environmental angst.
The statistics about energy usage - compiled by Sustainable Energy Ireland - were interesting, but much coverage reached for a rather obvious conclusion. We are, we were informed, a wasteful lot.
This is news? The Irish may prove to be champions, but as a species we've long proven ourselves to be pretty profligate. We waste time, money, water, food. We waste our health on fags, our lives through bad driving. And when wealthy enough to be wasteful, we exercise that right with especial vigour.
There is an argument, as a repost to Green rhetoric, that we've been wasting our individual guilt too. That all that 'power of one' talk only shifts a responsibility onto individuals whose contribution to global warming is minimal when compared to that of corporations; that the efforts of the few people in this island will be rubbed out by the actions of developing nations.
But when Sustainable Energy Ireland talked about the so-called 'comfort effect' - by which bigger houses and more appliances outweigh the benefits of greater energy-efficiency - they could include angst in that definition.
Environmental angst is a luxury available largely to those who can afford it, and the West has been able to afford great amounts of it in recent years.
Of course, it has been accompanied by great doses of double standards: people recycle bottles, but buy bottled water; they insulate houses, but fill them with extra appliances; they buy local food, but stick it in giant American fridge-freezers. They mean well, but they're just a bit too human.
However, if costs continue to rise, we will be burdened by the debt and less so by angst. Or, rather, our fears about wastage will be financially, instead of environmentally, motivated. It will be about saving the budget, not the planet. And in that, we'll come a little closer - though not close enough - to knowing what it's like to be among the greater number of people on this planet who can't afford to feel so angst-ridden about the planet.
It's been proven time and time again that only the threat of penalty - financial or legal - forces us to shape up. But even if a carbon levy, for example, comes with a rebate for low income households, there will be plenty of others stuck in an environmental and financial catch-22.
Say you're a young couple, who bought a home in the sprawling suburbs two years ago in an effort to get up the property ladder. Then the property market stalled, and suddenly you're stuck in a poorly-constructed house, without a decent public transport system and expecting a child whose school may be some distance away.
That finger-wagging about reducing energy usage and bills will be pretty irritating as you sit in your heat-leaking house, needing to drive everywhere, while at the whim of inept planning, the vicious undercurrents of the global economy and fuel costs made jittery by faceless speculators. The power of one will feel pretty meek.
Energy poverty, then, may even finally halt the rather questionable carbon offset industry. If we can just about afford to pay our fuel costs, we'll be pretty hard-pressed to shell out extra to make ourselves feel better about the energy we do use.
And yet, the irony of all this is that the global energy crisis will be far more effective in getting the environmental movement what it wants. The Green Party can't be certain that it will survive in a period of austerity, but it may go down having inadvertently got their way. Because there's nothing like a bit of global panic to get things moving quickly.
And we are indeed in a state of panic, especially in Britain and on the Continent. Financial penalties will reduce the public's use of energy, but the cold sweat of governments and multinationals will fuel the development of more efficient, cleaner energy at a speed that political lobbying could not.
The current situation will focus minds somewhat. It will focus our minds as we sit at home in an extra jumper rather than light the fire. It'll focus the minds of companies held to ransom by truckers and oil traders. Already, SUV sales are down in the US, where people are driving fewer miles for the first time in 30 years. Globally, airmiles may be the next to drop. And, all the while, environmentalists will delight quietly in our discomfort.
And they won't be feeling any angst about that.