Environmentalists have been sounding the alarm for decades, and now at last the call has been heard. It is not too late to save the planet, it's not even too late to save us a pleasant way of life in it. But it is far too late to do it without making painful choices.

Every aspect of our daily lives has an environmental impact - whether we want it or know about it, like it or not. But, and this is a very big but, it is not our fault that we have made a mess of the world just by living our ordinary lives in it. It is the way our lives work - under the hood so to speak - that is the problem, not so much what we actually do in the driver's seat. The metaphor is quite appropriate.

We could all have been driving vehicles that did not use fossil fuels for years if the oil producers had let us. Plans for energy efficient engines, motors, new technologies have been sought out and bought up by oil companies for at least twenty years to my knowledge. names can not be named here - too much money is at stake, but private investigations, leaks in the system, showed me that people were being employed twenty years ago to scan the world's press output for oil business threatening indicators so that they could be nipped in the bud. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is not illegal, it is sound business practice. That is the real area in which we need to change, our daily lives will change gently if we can change that.

Now that everyone knows the time is up, the oil companies will dig in to their vast store of good green ideas and call them their own - and make money from being green. Proof of this is hard to find but just watch and see where the funding for new technologies will come from - and where the money raised will return.

Had the environmental message not been stifled for so long then the painful choices we all have to make today could have been avoided.

That was the past, now what of the future? In 100 years, 50 or perhaps even sooner if we are lucky, we will be able to go about our every day lives without leaving our dirty carbon footprints all over our ecosystem. We can even live the green good life without knowing it. After all, we didn't know we were living dirty grey ones until just now.

It is down to the people we elect, the planners, the funders of technology and an adjustment of the attitudes taught us by advertising to change the world for the better.

If political judgments put Ecology before GDP (by realising there can be no GDP if domestic life is too gross to produce anything). If new buildings where built to replace bad old ones, not built to encase good farm land in tarmac and concrete. If money was used to encourage new technologies not shore up the old expensive black gold elephants. If advertisements told us how long a product would last and how much better the world was because of it rather than bedazzle us with hype and bury old products under it.  Then our children will be glad to be alive and not working all hours for an imaginary better future seen in a new advert.

Simon Anthony

Now also available on the Nottingham Evening Post letters page