IN 2007 I wrote about peak oil, the fact that there's a finite amount in the world, and that one day it will run out. It hasn't yet, and now it's become clear that we're doing all we can to delay this happening, even though the cost will be enormous and the damage to the planet excessive.

The easily accessible oil peaked about ten years ago, and it was thought that would lead to a rise in price so reducing both use and the CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere.

This didn't happen because the value of the future production helps set the share price and worth of multi-national oil companies. Our pensions and financial markets depend on this potential wealth, hundreds of billions of pounds worth, and discounting this would lead to a world recession far worse than the Thirties depression.

It's now expected that oil use, for vehicles, planes, shipping, heating and making plastic, paint, cosmetics and a host of other products, will rise from the current 94 million barrels a day, to 110 million in 2025 and almost 120 million by 2040.

That's an enormous amount of extra CO2 poised to enter the atmosphere, and it's made worse because new ways of getting it out of the ground generate more CO2 than the simple, gushing oil wells of the past. Then the return on energy invested was about fifty to one, but now the difficult oil fields are five to one, at best, and most are worse. It means there'll not only be the CO2 from the oil when it's used but also at least a fifth more just to extract it.

The new Clair field in the North Atlantic, west of Shetland, has drilling platforms in water 1,500 feet deep and then through 6,000 feet of rock. It's even worse off the Brazilian coast with 10,000 feet of water and 6,000 of salt rock before reaching the oil. And then there are the tar sands of Alberta in Canada. They are close enough to the surface to be strip mined before being boiled to separate the oil using vast quantities of water and CO2 generating electricity. And after that it's the Falklands, and the Arctic.

Unsurprisingly the US is setting the pace. It's currently producing more oil than it did at its 1972 peak, but now it's looking for the so called 'tight' oil – squeezed out of shale by over a million fracking wells using recent technology.

We will certainly need a binding carbon tax on fossil fuels from the Paris Climate Change Conference next year to have any chance of reducing CO2 emissions, or the world will be three degrees warmer by 2100.