I believe that the politicians have been trying to sell us the wrong problem.
It is indisputable that we live on a planet with finite resources. We will have fully exhausted all oil and coal reserves in a relatively short period of time - a few hundred years. Within the next 50 or so years, we need to get to a point where our limited oil and coal reserves (assuming there is any left) are being used for the purposes which only they can fulfill. And that means a migration to solar, wind, tidal and nuclear power based energy leaving the remaining hydrocarbons to be used as raw materials.
