Sir Jonathan Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, urged ministers not to give in to the protesters’ demands. He is right.

With oil flows disrupted by events in Iraq and the Gulf of Mexico, and with consumption in India and China rising sharply, it would be crazy to cut fuel tax. That would encourage people to use more of a product that is in short supply.

However, Gordon Brown, the chancellor, does not sound much saner than the protesters. In a speech to the TUC he pleaded with Opec (the mainly Arab cartel of oil-producing countries) to increase production.

Understandably Brown is worried about oil prices. Two major airlines in the United States are filing for bankruptcy as a result of higher fuel costs. Back home the rises will reduce Britain’s rate of economic growth and so tax revenues will fall below the forecasts on which his economic policy depends. The Bank of England predicts growth this year of 2%, where Brown had forecast 3% to 3.5%.

Opec will argue that the world is doing too little to reduce its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Anyway, high prices give energy companies the incentive to develop those oil and gas deposits that are costly to produce. Many of these are in areas that are more politically stable than the Middle East, so exploiting them can improve our security of supply.

This period of energy angst should be grabbed by politicians in the United States as an opportunity to argue the patriotic case for higher taxes on fuel. Paying more for petrol would help to reduce American dependence on imports. European politicians should now be making the case for developing other sources of energy, such as nuclear power.

We should not be too concerned that Arab countries are getting rich at our expense. Were the money to trickle down through the population, it might help to reduce poverty and ignorance and that should make life harder for the political extremists.

High oil prices can be lived with and past experience shows that fundamentally sound economies are well able to adapt even to sharp price rises.

However, Brown is urging other countries to put things right because the government is too timid to implement a long-term energy policy of its own.

When environmental issues first became a global concern, Britain was well placed to limit its emissions of noxious gases into the atmosphere. The demise of the British coal industry during Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers did the trick since it led to much greater usage of natural gas in power stations.

Now it is more difficult for Britain to meet its targets. In response to the 2000 protests the chancellor gave up the so-called “escalator” which sharply increased the tax on road fuels in every budget. That surrender dealt a mighty blow to the government’s energy strategy, which had been designed to force people onto public transport and to stimulate the development of new energy sources. Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions are now rising — up by more than 2% since 2002.

The nuclear power plants that are operating today produce about a fifth of Britain’s electricity and do so without contributing to global warming. This country’s emissions of greenhouse gases are between 7m and 14m tons less than they might be because of these power stations. Yet all but one of our nuclear plants will have closed by 2023. If the government does not replace them with new nuclear stations, it will face a huge problem and its green ambitions will look incredible.

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