Throughout the 20th century, an abundant supply of low-cost energy was the driving force behind the spread of global prosperity and development. Today, satisfying ever-growing energy demand in a sustainable way has become the world’s biggest challenge.

According to BP’s projections, we will need about 45 per cent more energy in 2030 than we consume today. That will require industry to pearl jewelry invest some $25 to $30 trillion — more than $1 trillion (£600 billion) a year for 20 years.

We need a more diverse energy mix — involving greater use of nuclear power and of renewable sources as well as fossil fuels — to enhance energy security and tackle climate change. But we also have to face a few facts. First, the transition to a lower-carbon economy is a journey that will take decades.

Second, it is not clear right now how we are going to get there. We need a clear road-map for the transition to a lower-carbon world, with governments and the private sector working together to shape the framework for our future energy mix.

Third, we should take a realistic view of the potential for alternative energy. There is a danger of promising too much, too soon.

You might say that this is what you would expect to hear from the chief executive of one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. But BP is also a significant investor in renewable resources such as wind, solar power and biofuels.

The reality is that the technology, infrastructure and regulatory framework for alternative energies will take decades to be deployed at scale. At present, all of the world’s wind, solar, wave, tide and geothermal power account for only about 1 per cent of total energy consumption. Looking ahead, even the boldest forecasts say they will meet less than 10 per cent of demand in 2030.

The sheer scale of the energy industry makes a rapid transition inconceivable. It takes 30 years, for example, to turn over the capital stock in the power generation sector and 15 years in cars. That is why it is so important to establish and start implementing a road-map for the transition now, based on an understanding of the existing infrastructure, changing technology and economic incentives.

It is all about smart choices — about ensuring that the money we invest is spent to best effect. In many cases, such choices can be made on the basis of biwa pearl what we know now, rather than technologies still in development. And the smartest and most effective choice we can all make is to use energy far more efficiently.

Take transport, responsible for 25 per cent of UK CO2 emissions. By far the most effective path to a lower- carbon road transport industry lies in making internal combustion engines more efficient. Smaller, more efficient petrol and diesel engines, combined with increasing use of hybrid technologies, will produce significant carbon savings in the next two decades.

Increasing use of biofuels will help. By extracting CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow, some biofuels can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent compared with conventional petrol, according to recent studies. At BP we believe that biofuels could provide more than 10 per cent of global road transport fuel by 2030. To put this into perspective, the combination of advanced hybrid cars and quality biofuels offers comparable CO2 savings to running battery-powered electric cars from the existing UK electricity grid — but at less than half of the additional cost.

Smart choices are also available in power generation, responsible for another 30 per cent of UK carbon emissions. Under EU regulations, a third of the UK’s coal-fired stations are due to be retired before 2016. A number of options present themselves to fill the gap: nuclear power, offshore wind, natural gas and clean coal.

In my view we will need all of them. But nuclear expansion still faces significant uncertainties. Offshore wind is extremely costly. As for new-build coal, to akoya pearl meet carbon targets it would need to be fitted with carbon capture and storage — a technology that, while showing promise, still faces challenges that will take time to resolve. Commercial plants are unlikely before 2020.

That leaves gas, the cleanest fossil fuel with less than half the carbon emissions of coal. It is abundantly available to the UK. Indigenous gas provides 73 per cent of UK consumption today and could still make up as much as 30 per cent in 2020. Gas is also widely available from non-UK suppliers, ranging from Norway to North Africa, as well as from the global market for liquefied natural gas. Any concerns about security of supply can be addressed by diversifying suppliers and building more storage capacity.

Gas is also a necessary complement for renewable sources, given that gas-fired generators — unlike nuclear and coal-fired plants — can be readily switched on and off to back up intermittent wind and solar power.

These are just some of the factors that need to be considered in drawing up an energy road-map for the UK. However, change on the scale envisaged will only happen if governments create the framework.

Industry needs stable and enduring conditions to invest, and in the case of energy that means a transparent and uniform price for carbon.

The EU has made a start with its Emissions Trading Scheme, but we are a long way from an effective, global carbon pricing regime. Until energy producers and consumers know and pay the real price of carbon, the climate for investing in a low-carbon economy will remain uncertain in the extreme. We will also need additional incentives and policies to drive technological innovation and behavioural change.

In the UK, a debate is under way about what more the Government needs to do to meet its commitments on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Like others, I worry that the liberalised energy market on its own will not deliver the sustainable and diverse supply mix we need.

History tells us that real change in energy markets can only occur when public policy and private enterprise work hand in hand. Government needs to play an active role in drawing up a road-map for our energy future. Industry can then move forward with confidence to invest in a secure and sustainable energy supply. I don’t believe we can afford to wait.

Who was Churchill’s favourite Spice Girl? Where did the Duke of Wellington have his first snog? Tell me, Dr Kissinger, are you a boxers man or briefs? Or did you broker an end to war in Indochina with something altogether scantier? The Cold War missile gap takes on a new dimension if we know you faced the Vietcong in only a thong.

The sense that public life has become one vast poptastic Smash Hits interview only grew firmer this weekend with the controversy over Gordon Brown’s reluctance to reveal his favourite biscuit. Pressed by questioners during an interview on Mumsnet, the pearl jewelry Prime Minister consistently evaded answering the question. How long before we read that such prevarication shows that the Government is running on empty when it comes to policy on teatime treats. And its much-vaunted Elevenses Strategy is clearly in ruins.

I expect I’ll soon receive a press release from the Club/Penguin Alliance, speaking on behalf of chocolate shortcake sandwiches everywhere slamming the PM’s indecision. “For years now British biscuits have been neglected compared to our continental counterparts. Government can’t ignore our crumbling position much longer. A period of economic difficulty is precisely the wrong time to cut back on our delicious thick-chocolate treats that hit the spot just when you need a break. Lord Mandelson needs to ensure the investment is there around fourish every afternoon, and we as a nation have to recognise, now more than ever, that a drink’s too wet without one.”

In the end the Prime Minister let it be known, through the No 10 briefing machine, that he rejected both the old Left choice of massive Boost bars we can no longer afford and the new Right approach of cutting investment by opting for supermarket value packs that, as we all know, now have only 18 not 20 items, thus representing a 10 per cent cut in biwa pearl biscuit resources. Instead he would ensure we all had something nice and chocolatey, which proved Labour cared.

I’m sorry the Prime Minister did relent. I wish that he had replied to TweetiePie@Gmail.com’s question: “I didn’t give up an hour in my sleep-starved, highly-frazzled day, when I could have been co-ordinating our response to the global downturn or negotiating with Nato partners over Afghanistan to answer the sort of questions which would be cosmically inane if directed by an eight-year-old to Mika in a webchat sponsored by Heat, but when put by a grown adult to the Prime Minister of the fourth largest economy in the world make me weep hot tears of despair at our shrivelled media culture. My favourite biscuits are actually the beautifully made florentines you get at Patisserie Valerie in Marylebone, but since revealing that now opens me up to ridicule as a hopeless epicurean and all round metrosexual mincer out of touch with the reality of akoya pearl life in Glasgow I suspect I’d better have hemlock and belladona on toast with my next cup of tea to ensure I can escape the misery of this soul-wrenchingly dishonest exercise."

Sack the wife, sell the home! It’s a catchy slogan, and catching MPs on the raw is now a national pastime. Flayed, protesting, they wince at each fresh handful of salt. After the letters from Sir Thomas Legg even Frank Field, one of the “saints”, flinches at a low kick. The retrospective application of limits is, he protests, as if you had been driving at 25mph in a 30mph zone — and then got fined because they arbitrarily introduced a 20mph limit.

He has a point. So do plenty of others, who were encouraged by the Fees Office to treat the expenses as an allowance, with neat totalling of the figures more important than justification. Cowardly, media-shy governments caused this problem, preferring a shady tangle of expenses to an honest increase in salary. This was aggravated when — at the dawn of a property boom — the extraordinary decision was taken under Mrs Thatcher to pay mortgage interest in full. Thereafter, while professional salaries outside Parliament rocketed in the boom years, MPs’ sense of entitlement made them feel that their claims were natural justice.

A few are real rogues. There should be no forgiveness for the serial flipping of homes, the building of property portfolios funded by the taxpayer, and other obvious abuses with or without ducks. But the present problem is that many MPs still simply find it impossible to understand why the public is angry, and their tone of aggrieved innocence only enrages us further. The relationship between elected legislators and electorate is becoming like a pearl jewelry really bad marriage (with, heaven forfend, Esther Rantzen as the Other Woman, who Understands). This split is not healthy. Nor is the pious extremism of Legg. We need mediation.

So let us embark on couples therapy, and force each party to listen quietly to the other’s plaints. MPs first: sit on your hands, stop harrumphing, just listen! Your partner, the electorate, is angry for several reasons. First, because times are hard and insecurity widespread; taxes have risen, the 10 per cent rate is axed, and for 15 years new Labour has taken the attitude that even the lowest paid must not hang on to their own money, but rely on inefficiently distributed government largesse from a labyrinthine system of credits. Second, among the growing army of self-employed there is incredulity that many genuine and unavoidable working expenses are denied tax relief by the pitiless Revenue, while MPs get the whole sum repaid in full. Third, we were shocked that when Parliament sanctimoniously agreed to open its expenses to scrutiny, it planned to “redact” them with miles of thick black lines, so that we would never have known the worst.

Oh, and fourth, we are irritated by the self-defensive rage displayed by members over the whole business. John Mann, the MP for Bassetlaw who started it, writes that in the House senior figures “bellow” at him and purple-faced comrades in biwa pearl the tearoom hiss that he “broke ranks” and “failed to understand our values”. That this attitude is widespread is confirmed by tactless fools such as Margaret Beckett, who smarmed on Question Time that we “don’t understand” money, and that MPs are “very busy” and so make mistakes (let the rest of us tell that to the cruel Revenue!).

Get it? You’re in disgrace, Hon. Members, and if the Legg justice is a bit rough, and if Sir Christopher Kelly ends up sacking your efficient relative and pulling the plug on your mortgage, that’s why.

You lacked empathy, you went your own way, you kept a wad of luxury receipts locked in your secret desk while we lived on baked beans. So, like any aggrieved wife, we blew a fuse.

OK. Now is the moment for the other partner, the electorate, to sit still and listen to the grievances from the Westminster side. An MP’s basic pay really is not that good: £64,766 may be an exciting salary for the young and green, but people of professional years and training could get more outside. Sorry, but they could. Moreover, if an MP works as hard as an MP should, the hours and responsibilities are heavy. If he or she doesn’t — well, you should have noticed, and sacked the idle sods several elections ago.

It is stressful and expensive to live in two places, far apart. The flipping of second homes to milk the system has been deplorable, but the principle was fair. Those with suburban seats and two homes a few miles apart have definitely been cheating: but only the spirit of the rules, not the letter. Which brings us to the Fees Office: altogether too soft a touch.

Here the MPs’ excuse is an old one: “She threw herself at me, I couldn’t resist . . .”.

The other matter is office costs. Again, over-generous and milked by a few; but on £65K a year you shouldn’t have to buy your own stamps at work. As for akoya pearl staffing salaries, profound public irritation has been caused by MPs employing close relatives without the fair process (and risk of discrimination tribunals) that dog every other modern employer. Kelly looks set to ban MPs from hiring their families and, after the scandal of Derek Conway’s sons picking up £82,000 for not much, not to mention the merry ridicule of Jacqui Smith’s husband, a vengeful public may nod in approval. No bunce for spouses! Stop subbing your feckless student kids on our money! Why should Peter Hain have been allowed to slip his octogenarian mother £5,400 a year and Anthony Steen to give his daughter £5,000 for “half a day a week”? I pluck examples from the air; there are plenty more.

But hang on, enraged public: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Parliamentary marriages are vulnerable. The MP is thrown into an intense, precarious, steamy environment of would-be alpha males and strong-willed women, and the spouse is left — often many miles away — to manage family life and answer the phone to cross or worried constituents. If he or she is willing to do it formally, earn a salary and understand the MP’s work, the marriage has a better chance. Employing spouses looks odd to corporate types, but in small businesses it is common.

Nick Clegg’s suggestion that only one family member should be allowable seems reasonable. Children, in-laws, mistresses and others could be outlawed, and transparency is vital. But a spouse-ban could end many decent, honourable careers.

Yes, we need therapeutic mediation. Can we still live together, Members and electors? Can we rebuild mutual respect? Hell, what alternative is there?

It’s a bright Sunday lunchtime in October and the scene on Northampton Square, where the offices of Finsbury give way to residential Islington, is rather bucolic for central London. A couple of dozen bikes are being chained to the square’s railings; young children chase squirrels through the fallen leaves. At the centre of the square, around a bandstand that wouldn’t turn down a fresh coat of paint if offered, 100 or so people are showing their appreciation for a succession of bands and singer-songwriter types, each of whom are playing a short acoustic set of no more than four songs.

This is Bandstand Busking, a monthly event that gives up-and-coming musicians the opportunity to perform in the underused bandstands dotted around the capital’s parks. The performances, all professionally filmed and uploaded to the Bandstand Busking website, make an impressive calling card for each performer should any record-company A&R men be sniffing around. More than this, though, Bandstand Busking has evolved into a unique gigging experience, offering close-quarters performances in unusual, often acoustically rich surroundings.

Today, there are four bands on the bill, all of pearl jewelry whom are accompanied by an enthusiastic chorus of purring pigeons, buzzing light aircraft and, less sympathetically, ambulance sirens. The format suits perfectly what seems to be the preferred musical style — folk-edged indie-pop. First up comes the ice-breaking one-man-junk-shop sound of Stairs to Korea, followed 10 minutes later by the ukulele/cello/melodica/drums line-up of the Lofty Heights. By the time the duo Tap Tap give us a couple of numbers, the session is in full swing, and the crowd, many with a beer in hand, has swelled nicely. Their number ensures a hearty reception for the best turn of the day, from Player Piano, a combo who, in this three-piece incarnation, sound like a more polite Violent Femmes.

With its loose grasp of timekeeping and charmingly ramshackle approach, Bandstand Busking is the antithesis of today’s super-slick, cash-rich live-music industry. In the same week that Jay-Z’s Alexandra Palace gig sold out in a brain-scrambling 15 seconds, here on Northampton Square, not a single penny changes hands. The performers aren’t paid and no entrance fee is asked of the audience. Instead, it seems to be a mutually beneficial exercise with decidedly altruistic undertones. “It’s about access to music,” Thomas Muirhead, a co-founder, explains after the crowd has dispersed and the last bikes are released from the railings. “We’ve drawn a line. We will not pay a band to appear and we will not charge people to watch it. Those are the biwa pearl only rules we have.”

Now run by a fluid collective of up to 20 people, Bandstand Busking has been in operation for nearly two years. It was set up by three graduates who discovered that London is home to 35 bandstands — “The joy of Google Maps,” laughs Ian Sutherland, another of the founders. Reviving these forgotten structures as live-music venues has been an incredibly successful venture, the team persuading many critically acclaimed acts to perform, including King Creosote, Brakes, Of Montreal, the Leisure Society and, most impressive, this year’s Mercury winner, Speech Debelle.

Initially, the sessions were organised solely for the purpose of filming, but the team soon realised that the performances would be enhanced with the addition of an audience. With an audience, however, came the legal requirement to obtain a licence from the relevant council. Until that point, the approach had been decidedly informal. “We have been thrown off bandstands before,” Sutherland chuckles, “such as when we put on Broadcast 2000 in Golders Green.” Muirhead interrupts: “But that one was actually locked.” “Okay, yes, we did have to jump the fence.” When filming Of Montreal in Regent’s Park, they managed to persuade the wardens to turn a blind eye until the session finished. “They said, ‘All right, we’ll walk the other way for 10 minutes.’”

Despite live music being the reason these bandstands were built, getting licences isn’t easy. Although Bandstand Busking now has a good relationship with Islington council, it originally encountered a little local difficulty. “There’s a woman who lives in that house over there,” Muirhead whispers, glancing over his shoulder, “who doesn’t like music being played on the bandstand. She caused some problems.” “We’ve been planning to write to Boris to ask him to make it easier for us,” Sutherland adds. “It’s a good cultural thing, after all. And if he’s appearing in EastEnders...” So you’d welcome him onto the bandstand? “Maybe he plays the spoons.”

The collective might now meet the box-ticking demands of local bureaucracy, but Bandstand Busking retains its ad hoc spirit. Indeed, this time yesterday, there was only one confirmed artist on the bill after Mercury nominees the Invisible pulled out when the singer lost his voice. Cue a frenzy of phone calls and the securing of three more acts at ridiculously short notice.

Each of this afternoon’s turns clearly relishes playing in this environment, albeit that it comes with particular pressures. They're able to see the whites of each audience member’s eyes, and there’s nowhere to hide. “They’ve got people sitting at their feet,” Muirhead agrees. “There’s no room for anything less than perfection.” Yet these on-the-rise acts, most of whom come away from a normal gig with next to nothing in their pockets, love the Bandstand Busking concept. “Promoters who run nights in London don’t really promote,” explains Greg Griffin, the Lofty Heights’ singer. “They let the bands do it. So I really like this vibe. You don’t have to listen to a corporate jukebox and buy overpriced beer in some pub. Just put it on yourself. Do a guerrilla show.”

Certainly, the Bandstand Busking team’s refusal to make money from their venture is refreshing. Although minor costs are incurred by each event, these are absorbed by the salaries of their day jobs. “It’s not significant amounts of money,” says Sutherland, by day an accountant in the music business. Muirhead nods in agreement: “It’s less than we’d pay if we all went to these bands’ gigs. It’s just a cheaper way of seeing them.”

As the sun slides behind the square’s townhouses and the neighbourhood dog-walkers reoccupy the park, another successful busk is in the can, allowing the akoya pearl team to start planning the next event. But their ambitious thinking isn’t limited to lo-fi up-and-coming acts. “I want Björk on a bandstand,” Muirhead announces, a twinkle in his eye. “And the troop of colourful people she’d bring with her. And, of course, if Thom Yorke popped down and said he’d like to do a piano session, we wouldn’t turn him away.”

Mick Fleetwood, 6ft 6in of military bearing, white beard, gold watch chain and pinstriped waistcoat, sits back in an armchair that can barely contain his extensive frame. “You know what I’d love?” the Fleetwood Mac drummer says to a hovering assistant, eyeing the bottle of water in front of him with some disdain, “A little glass of red.” In the old days, that little glass of red would have been the first of many libations, accompanied by copious quantities of cocaine: when the band recorded Rumours, a velvet bag full of the drug was kept beneath the studio mixing desk, for dipping into at will.

Nowadays, the group’s remaining co-founder is drug-free, and, though he still carries about him an unmistakable whiff of volcanic unpredictability, the 62-year-old seems to be settling into his role as the calm centre of the Fleetwood Mac storm. During the band’s mid-1970s commercial heyday, he served briefly as their unofficial manager, which, considering that he was running amok on brandy and cocaine, probably says a lot.

Thirty-plus years on, the group have individual managers, together with an impressive number of helpmeets, chauffeurs and eagle-eyed enablers. The band appear to travel for the most part separately, with their own retinues. What Lindsey Buckingham will later describe as the “residue” of historic dysfunction still requires placating. They could surely, I suggest to Fleetwood, just sort it all out themselves, couldn’t they?

“It could be a lot easier,” he agrees with a pearl jewelry characteristic chuckle. “You know, make a decision and move on. We all used to be so much more in control of our own destinies, we just bundled along ourselves and did pretty well — considering. I always call the managers, and I don’t mean it nastily, the Gang of Five [Christine McVie, who left the band in 1998, is still represented], like a kind of Maoist thing. So, yes, things take a little more time now. But, you know, we’re still here.”

Fleetwood is holding court in a hotel suite in Copenhagen, the city where, several days later, the four surviving members of the Rumours line-up — Fleetwood and his fellow original bandmate John McVie, plus Stevie Nicks and Buckingham, who both joined in 1974 — are due to kick off the European leg of their current world tour. To accompany the dates, a double album of greatest hits is being released, featuring the songs that make up the majority of the set-list they will perform. It is the first time they have headed out on the road without a new studio album to promote, but that, says Fleetwood, has its advantages. “There’s a lot less of that pressure, of having to rehearse a load of new songs, then force people to listen to them.” Does he wonder why they didn’t try it years ago?

“I always joke with Lindsey,” he replies, “that we’re probably the worst run but most ongoingly successful music franchise in the business, if you look at what we don’t do and what we could have done. If you were a cynic and went, ‘Huh, they’re just doing it for the money,’ it’s like, ‘Hang on a minute, I wish we had.’”

None of this is said with any apparent bitterness: Fleetwood has the avuncular-referee role down pat. He admits the biggest pleasure he derives from the biwa pearl hits-only set list is the opportunity it gives him to place the band’s key albums in some sort of perspective. The biggest surprise, he says, is how linked they strike him as being: the feeling-their-way radio pop/lingering blues hybrid of the new line-up’s self-titled 1975 debut, the soft-rock masterclass of Rumours and the wildly experimental disjointedness of 1979’s Tusk. And how uncategorisable. “As poppy as our legacy is in many ways,” he says, “I think, equally, there’s a darkness about it. We’ve never done coy and cute.”

The tension Fleetwood admits marred the band’s previous world tour — to promote 2003’s Say You Will album — is, he believes, less evident now. Not that things don’t remain unsaid: this is Fleetwood Mac, after all. But there is still no chance, he says, of recruiting a group therapist, of the type documented in the Metallica film Some Kind of Monster. “At various times,” Fleetwood laughs, “I think we’ve all been to one on our own. When it sort of imploded with emotion was when all of us were besotted with emotional overload, so nobody could sort of take the back seat and come in impartially. But it’s like kids in a playground. Last week someone was your best friend, and this week they’re inviting someone else round for a play.”

Several days earlier, in a different suite at the same hotel, one of the other kids in the Mac playground reclines with a Lady Bertram-like torpor on a giant sofa, her eyes hidden behind vintage Aviator shades. It would simply not be possible to talk to either Nicks or Buckingham about their love affair, which famously crashed and burned during the Rumours sessions, in tandem with the collapse of the McVies’ marriage, without reopening a can of worms. “Residue”, Buckingham called it. I’m not sure that does it justice.

“Lindsey is definitely still angry with me,” Nicks says in her dusky drawl. “Absolutely. He’s never quite understood why we broke up. Even though he’s married and he’s very happy, and he’s a great dad, I think that he never really forgave me for breaking up our relationship.”

Long characterised as an away-with-the-fairies fruitcake, Nicks strikes me as having a core of steel, no matter her languor or penchant for woolly soliloquy. By her own admission the only member of the band who could rival Fleetwood — with whom she had an affair — for hedonism, she long ago conquered her drug addiction, then endured a lengthy and briefly life-threatening dependency on the tranquillisers she had been prescribed to wean her off cocaine. These days, she appears to be physically somewhat fragile, but the mischievous candour remains. She tells me she finally went to see a psychologist “about five years ago, a really sweet little lady, and we were just talking about my life, and I was telling her about those years, when Lindsey and I first moved to LA, and I was a waitress, a cleaning lady, and anything else I could do to akoya pearl pay our rent, and I said to her, ‘But there was something about those years that I really loved.’ And she said, ‘Well, in many ways, Stevie, the day you joined Fleetwood Mac was the saddest day of your life — because it was the day you stopped being the caretaker.’ You can imagine, there was a real big silence in the room when she said that”.

When Nicks and Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, they were at the tail end of a four-year struggle to make it as a duo, and heavily in debt. But they both to this day believe that they would have made it on their own terms, and it is this sense of unfinished business and unrealised dreams, together with nostalgia for a time before what Nicks calls the “very fast and very hard” ascent to stardom they experienced with Fleetwood Mac, that appears to haunt them still.