Motorists queuing for petrol or diesel at rip-off forecourt prices, or householders facing eye-watering increases in gas and electricity bills, may think that things can hardly get worse.

But they can - much worse. Before long it may be a question not of super-expensive fuel, but no fuel at all, as the electricity supply to the pumps is cut.

It may be a question not just of sky-high utility bills but of falling gas pressures, electricity rationing and power cuts.

A decade of inertia, woolly energy White papers, noble but utopian climate schemes and distant targets for a low-carbon future, wind farms and bicycles, have left us utterly and dangerously unprepared for what is coming in the meantime.

This could turn out to be the worst feature of all of the Blairite legacy. We could be left with not a broken society but a literally paralysed society.

It is now too late to escape the consequences of the Government's appalling neglect.

Key decisions on energy supply have been fatally delayed by a Government obsessed with short-term spin. But with a vigorous change of approach right across the energy front it is just possible that the very worst impact on the UK, on both industry and households, can be limited.

First, a few facts. Our economy remains deeply dependent on oil. Not only does oil still lie at the centre of a vast range of everyday manufactured products, from clothing to contact lenses, from credit cards to computer chips.

But the whole transport sector is reeling from the high oil cost with knock-on effects on every retail item, especially food, guaranteeing a continuation of spiralling prices, however many letters the Governor of the Bank of England writes to the Chancellor.

The oil price is going to stay high, whatever happens. We can squeeze out a lot more, but it will cost a lot more and take time.

The huge Asian oil thirst, plus ever-higher extraction costs, will see to that. The price may dip a few dollars and a clever Government would try and stabilise it with tax adjustments (up when it falls, down when it soars, as now). But it could go anywhere. Desperate calls to OPEC from Gordon Brown, as he visits Saudi Arabia, for instant increases in oil output, will be met with polite and knowing smiles.

As well as being heavily oil-based, our society is completely electric. Almost everything in daily life depends on electric current and electricity demand is growing in leaps and bounds.

The people at the National Grid, in charge of our electricity supply, keep reassuring us that there is a big enough margin of capacity to meet the heaviest demand peak on the coldest day, but in fact they are holding their breath.

Our electricity comes from a mix of power stations - the more recent mostly gas, the older mostly coal-fired and nuclear. Over the next six years 40 per cent of this ageing fleet will have to be shut down - for environmental, safety or obsolescence reasons. But replacements, which are needed in short order, are not being built.

Grid officials look with dismay at maps of the offshore wind farms that are supposed to fill the gap, and at the power transmission system. There is no connection between the two. Armies of new pylons across the countryside, and big new switching stations, will be needed to get this unreliable and ultra-expensive energy into the system.

Our only hope for the "gap years" ahead is to build a lot more gas-fired stations quickly.

The UK's appetitive for gas for electricity generation has already grown to be one of the world's largest. But where will we get it? Norway will help, and so will the frozen gas suppliers (so-called Liquid Natural Gas or LNG) like Qatar. But others will be bidding briskly for the frozen cargoes as well, and some have already been diverted before reaching us. Gas, like oil, is going to stay very expensive.

There is loose talk of a common EU energy policy, meaning that we want to be in on the giant Continental gas grid fed heavily from Russia. But the Russians are tricky suppliers and besides, when it comes to using their gas it turns out that the big Continental monopolies like to have first gulp and on a cold day that can leave just a dribble at the end of the line, where the UK sits.

Then there are those who put their faith in biofuels. But this turns out to be madness, cutting food supplies and sending food prices soaring, while making a dubious net contribution to energy saving.

The only realistic way out of this maze of conflicting aims and needs and the only hope of avoiding breakdown in energy supplies, is through heavy emphasis on new technologies, in transport, in the home, in clean burning methods for coal, in using waste heat from existing power stations far more intelligently and, despite the lateness, in new nuclear power stations.

This is where every available incentive should be focused. This is the pathway to getting out from under the dominance of oil, and the thrall we are all in to oil prices.

In America the brilliant Winning the Oil End Game by Professor Amory Lovins provides a superb manual, showing how the transition to much lower oil usage can be swift, smooth and profitable This is far better than chasing will-o'-the wisp carbon emission trading schemes which never seem to work, or ill-administered subsidies for favourite projects, or dubious carbon offset schemes, which enrich a few and do little for either energy security or the environment.