Seeing the vertiginous ascent of oil prices over the past months, it just makes no sense to talk about coping with today’s oil prices. One may as well assume that sometime over the coming months, oil will touch the $200 a barrel mark.

Actually, that may be on the optimist side. Alexey Miller, the chief executive of Gazprom, has been quoted as saying: “We are living in the time of a great surge in oil and gas prices: a structural shift in the market which will end with prices at a radically new level.

“Fierce competition is unveiling for access to energy resources. Oil price rises are linked to a major revision of long-term forecasts. They demonstrate global energy supply-demand imbalance in the coming decades.”

It was that vision, he said, that explained his prediction that the price of oil could next year reach $250 a barrel.

All over the world, governments, beset by scarce credit, falling asset prices and costly food, are finding they are hardly well-equipped to cope with the oil bill.

Predictably, politicians have been looking for scapegoats, mainly “speculators”, but this hardly addresses the issue. Had there been speculators, there would have been mounting stocks of real crude oil, as the physical market failed to clear at the inflated speculator-driven price. But that has not been happening, with a few exceptions.

Besides, the price of commodities in which there is essentially no activity by financial investors, such as rice, has also been rising sharply.

Nor is it true that oil is pricey because it is running out. The Middle East still seems to contain far more oil than is normally thought. And even if new finds elsewhere have been rarer and less accessible than in the past, vast quantities of oil could now be profitably stripped from tar sands and shale.

A far truer cause is the rise of the economies of Asia, the improvement in living standards and the development of economies that have created a structural shift in global demand. As Mr Miller put it: ‘The past 10 years saw China’s energy consumption almost double and India’s grow over 1.5 fold. Asia has replaced bikes with scooters. What about the next step to cars?’

The whole world is entering a period of enormous strain. In agriculture it takes time to bring more land into production. Even more in energy, projects’ lives are measured in decades and can easily take 10 years from concept to the start of production. There has been a general lack of investment over the past two decades in power generation and network connections: there are long lists to buy wind turbines, constraints in shipping coal around the world, a lack of refineries to turn crude oil into diesel, etc.

All over the world, governments are coming under increased pressure, but not all pressures are the right strategy and governments must, above all, stop delaying the world’s adjustment to higher oil prices. Half the world’s people are still sheltered from fuel prices by subsidies – which perversely have boosted demand and mostly benefited the better off. Now, countries like Indonesia, Taiwan and Sri Lanka have begun to realise that they can ill afford this.

The 1970 oil spiral also showed how demand and supply, inelastic in the short run, eventually gave rise to conservation and new production. Those first two oil shocks banished oil from power generation. The present crisis may well free transport from oil’s century-long monopoly: it is no coincidence that car companies are suddenly accelerating their plans to sell electric hybrids that are far cheaper to run than petrol or diesel cars at these prices.

Coming to the local scene, one can now see, far clearer than it was at the time, how crazy was Labour’s proposal to halve the surcharge. As this paper has said over and over again in the past few months, even the surcharge concept should go, and at last the government seems to have heeded this advice and will soon include what we call the surcharge with the price of fuel, so that people stop considering the surcharge as something extra that can be removed at will.

It is also right that the government is resisting the siren voices that tell it to cut VAT on fuel-related prices. The fact is that fuel prices in Malta are among the cheapest in Europe and that taxes on fuel in Malta are likewise cheaper. Just because Nicolas Sarkozy is suggesting cutting taxes, it makes no sense for us to follow him before we see what will inevitably happen in France.

What the government should be doing, on the other hand, is to bite the bullet and take the important structural decisions it has been holding back on. That is why it must assume, as this leader said at the beginning, that oil will top the $200 mark soon and maybe go over it, because what does not make sense at $90 a barrel suddenly makes sense at $200.

Hence wind energy, whether offshore or onshore.

But a solution of sorts may be nearer at hand: the government should incentivise the creation of energy from natural sources by giving out more incentives to those who buy solar heaters until practically every house has one, by facilitating solar panels and, more importantly, by subsidising all those who put more energy into the grid than they get out of it. Sooner or later, with the electricity bills we will be getting, every house will inevitably turn to the wind generators that are now coming in. Meanwhile, the long-term aim of joining Malta to the Sicily energy grid is a good thing and is moving on.

But most important of all, our best resource is the way our forefathers used to build their homes. Unfortunately, we have let this all fall into abeyance, which is why the skills of old become more handy now that oil is nearing $200 a barrel.