That hurts! So we are going to have to pay that much more for the water and power surcharge. We will have to find so much more money to settle the inflated Water Services and Enemalta bill.

The government is so sorry to inflict this terrible pain on us. As indeed it should be. Forget the electoral campaign of just a few weeks ago, when we were promised so much manna from heaven. When the dark economic clouds were already on us. With what we are facing and being made to pay, we are unlikely to maintain our present standard of living, let alone improve it.

The writing has been on the wall so long. This crisis has been brewing for decades.

And what did the government do about it? Nothing. Zilch.

We have had talk about linking to the European power grid. Some solution, that! As if that will make electricity cheaper! Or more assured!

Europe depends on Russia for a lot of its power generation. And Vladimir Putin has been no pushover. Does anyone believe Malta will be spared any power from Europe should Russia, for some reason, turn the screw on its supplies to Europe?

Europe has not even helped us much with our fairly straightforward irregular migration problem. Does anyone really believe Europe would deprive itself of electricity to help Malta should the power supply start drying up in Europe, because of Russian foreign policy? Have another think!

And, apart from dipping our finger into the European grid, we plan to have a wind farm out at sea. God bless us! We have more sun than we have wind, but we are going out to sea to install wind turbines. Which will be at the mercy of the heavy shipping in the Mediterranean. And which will cost so much to maintain!

Is that a harebrained idea, or isn’t it? I wonder who sold that idea to our government! And anyway, what has been done about the plan? Have we made the necessary studies about sea conditions? About wind strength and currents? About what maintenance will be needed? Have we at least started those studies? Have we drawn up the tenders we will need to issue? Or is it just talk, talk, talk, while we pay more and more from our noses for bread, for food, for fuel, and in taxation? Just what is the government doing to turn to alternative sources of energy? I mean, doing meaningfully.

The government could have started so long ago to educate people on how to conserve energy. Did you ever hear, for instance, of any ways which could keep the sun out of our houses in summer, to prevent our rooms from getting so uncomfortably warm? And to cut on the use of energy-hungry air conditioners?

No one told me anything about how I could go about it. There has been no guidance whatsoever. So, because of that, all those who had the lolly turned to air conditioning. It was so convenient.

And the newly-built Lm100 million (or was it Lm200 million?) Delimara power station could not cope with the demand for power. Summer overtook winter in electricity production!

I fell for the air conditioning idea, too, till I saw the rate of energy consumption.

I looked around me a bit, racking my brains for some other way to keep cool, and came up with a solution, of sorts. I bought me a bamboo curtain (tal-qasab) and hung it outside to block the sun from my kitchen. Outside is the solution.

Try it with your car’s sunshade. Stretch it across the windscreen on the outside, and feel the difference when you go back into the car. Better still, drape the car all over on the outside before you go to the office. Use the car cover.

Hanging a curtain inside the home gives you privacy but is no screen against the sun’s warmth. With a curtain inside, the room becomes as hot as the sun’s rays just the same. But hang the curtain out, and it prevents the heat from coming in. And no, the curtain does not block the light. It does that only partially, if the curtain is made of bamboo. And if you hang the curtain a foot or so out from the wall the light will even be strong.

I did the same at my front door, hanging another bamboo curtain there, which is furled up in the morning, when the sun is not yet shining directly on my side of the street. And all I need at home today is a fan. Which I switch off at night. In winter I remove the curtains. I never use the air conditioner I have.

Now my solution may not be the ideal, but it has served me well. Has the government ever told anyone what to do to conserve energy, about how to be economical with it?

Is it better to switch off the bathroom water heater, for instance, when it is not in use? Has the government got the university to conduct research into how to build buildings which can be a bit cooler than what we have built so far? Is there nothing we can lay out on our roofs, to prevent them getting so warm, which in turn warms the house?

Because there is air conditioning, and this idea of dipping into the European grid, and of building wind turbines, God knows how far into the future, nothing has really been done nation-wide.

George W. Bush had a challenge when he went into the White House. To lessen the US’s dependence on foreign oil, and find a substitute for it.

He chose instead to go to Iraq, after building a fake case for war. And today Mr George W. Myopic Bush can do nothing about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Because with the US, and most of the world, still heavily dependent on imported oil, Mr Bush dare not threaten Iran’s oil output, and send the oil markets into a frenzy. So President Ahmedinejad can safely cock a snook at the world’s only super power. At the whole world, in fact.

Such is the leader we have had of the Western world for the past eight years! President Bush’s failures have seen US farmers growing corn for fuel, instead of for food. And while Iraq is today in a worse situation than it was under the cruel, despotic Saddam Hussein, we too are worse off because of the ever rising cost of fuel and food.

Our government, in the meantime, still basks in the hardly remembered glow of Malta’s decades-old UN initiatives about the seabed and, to a much lesser extent, about climate change. As if that is doing us much good.

There is another initiative the government can take internationally, if it has the gumption to defy Brussels, if necessary. It can go to the small countries of the world, which find themselves in the same awful predicament as Malta, and urge them to form a lobby.

To bring pressure to bear on the US, Opec, Russia and the EU to get them to do something about the situation. Or for these to find a way of helping those who have no means of helping themselves. And to make the US and the EU, as the most influential global powers, come up with an alternative to oil. Today, not tomorrow.

Hell, the West is not working hard enough to come up with a substitute for oil. The latest idea they have come up with is to develop Iraq’s oil potential. To send more carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Are we serious about managing climate change, or aren’t we?

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