"You have to act quickly, because very soon these fields will be dry." This prediction, drawled by hardened oilman Daniel Plainview in this year's best film, There Will Be Blood, has become a reality. Eight years into the 21st century and we are seeing the beginnings of a new energy horizon. Oil is receding into the distance. Nature's "free gift" to humanity is running out, fast.

2008 will come to be seen as the year the world's leaders were forced to confront their demons. The global response to stratospheric oil prices will determine if we are able to escape the worst consequences of climate change, feed the world and prevent pollution from ruining living conditions in our ever expanding cities. Trillions of dollars will be spent in the next few decades on technologies to generate energy, as old infrastructure rusts and economies expand in parts of the world that have endured poverty for centuries.

It's long been known that energy giant ExxonMobil has been pumping money into organisations and think tanks which have spread confusion and doubt about climate change. Our own ExxonSecrets project has been exposing the links between the company and these outspoken bodies for several years.

Some bad news from our Nordic office: around 4000 tonnes of raw oil has leaked into the North Sea, in the second largest oil spill in Norwegian history.

25,000 barrels-worth of oil leaked into a key herring and mackerel ground and is now drifting northwards. The waves are too high for any oil lenses to work, and a lot of the oil's being washed underwater.

The accident happened when a pipe broke during the loading of oil from the Statfjod A platform in bad weather.

There's more on Reuters.

This claim to Antarctic land epitomises the government's lack of a coherent approach to tackling climate change.

In April, the British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, took climate change to the UN security council for the first time. Of major concern of the government, she said, were the expected "major changes to the world's physical landmass during this century," that would result from unabated climate change. It is a bitter irony, therefore, that it should now be that same British Foreign Office that is trying to profit from the melting ice of Antarctica and exploit precisely the changes to the world's landmasses that Beckett warned us about.

After twenty years out of fashion, the term 'cold war' has become the hot favourite in Fleet Street once more. Not just because diplomatic relations between Russia and the UK distinctly frosty at the moment, but Russia's current Arctic adventures are lowering the temperature even further.

Exxon's PR campaign (which seems to run along the lines of "we may fund climate change deniers and oppose Kyoto but we're quite nice really") suffered a slight setback yesterday, when 300 people from the oil industry apparently believed that Exxon's newest fossil fuel was made out of human flesh - belonging to the victims of climate change.

Well, despite Exxon's protestations of squeaky-cleanness earlier this year, it looks like climate change skeptics can rest easy in their beds; climate change denial is going to be a lucrative industry for a while yet.