The West pulls up a drawbridge
There's an aggressive and a defensive Western reaction to this threatening world, both of which are mistaken, writes Timothy Garton Ash. Call them the crusader and the drawbridge options. The crusader option was Bush in Iraq. Now we'll see more of the drawbridge. Defensive, fearful, protectionist, shot through with a cultural pessimism worthy of Oswald Spengler, this variant says: pull up the drawbridge in front of the old stone fortress called Western Civ. Keep out as many alien people, goods, ideas as possible. Don't try to change the attitudes of Islamic states, Russia or China. Belonging to different civilisations, they have different values, and always will. The best we can hope for is a kind of armed truce, on the lines of "you do it your way, we do it ours". So this Western conservative view deplores multiculturalism at home but favours it abroad.
Timothy Garton Ash The Guardian
Life without cars
Unless more economical, probably non-fossil fuel, vehicles are developed soon, private cars will be something that people in rural areas reserve for local pottering and others will keep – if they can afford it – for use mostly in emergencies, says Mary Dejevsky. Long-distance commuting by car, driving for pleasure, or even that popular move made by families from the inner city to the suburbs when the children start school, could become a thing of the past. In the United States, some planners already envisage a future where the country is essentially turned inside out, with derelict McMansions littering the landscape, and the outer suburbs, with no public transport and worthless housing, becoming the equivalent of today's inner-city slums.
Mary Dejevsky The Independent
The end of the Oil age
At the time of the last energy shock in the 1970s, Sheikh Yamani, the shrewd Saudi Oil Minister, famously told his greedier Opec colleagues that they would encourage replacement of oil by other energy sources and kill the golden goose that had made them wealthy if they kept pushing the oil price too high, notes Anatole Kaletsky. "Remember," he said, "the Stone Age didn't end because the cavemen ran out of stone." The last three global recessions - in 1974, 1980 and 1991 - were all triggered by an oil shock and it looks as if Opec is now determined to repeat this experience. How many such shocks will it take before we control our addiction to oil? An oil price of $140, never mind $200 or $300, is simply too economically damaging to be tolerated much longer. Anatole Kaletsky The Times
Why big oil is not to blame for fuel prices 
The Conservative plan
We can book a tailor-made holiday on the other side of the world at a click of a button, writes David Cameron. Social networking can drive the environmental agenda. And Google can tell us more about our illness than our doctors. Yet we still have a government wedded to top-down state control. The future is people-led. Politics must respond - and with the Conservatives, it will. We will give parents the power to set up new schools. Once parents are more closely involved in how their child's school is run, they will take more responsibility for making sure it is a success. The same goes for welfare reform. We will give more power to charities and social enterprises that really know how to get people into work - paying them for their success.
David Cameron The Times
Rowan Williams - closet liberal
Dr Rowan Williams portrays himself as radically inclined, yet on homosexuality he has aligned himself with a conservative cause, writes George Walden. Sacred texts can be disputed, but all that matters is what the Bible would have said had it been known that homosexuality is largely genetic. How Christian can it be to deny men and women a sexuality that is, in Christian terms, God-given? Why does the Archbishop not say out loud what we all suspect that he believes? His views on everything from Israel to Afghanistan via a third runway at Heathrow airport are as forthright as they are predictable. To listen to the Archbishop, the infamy of US imperialism is unparalleled in human history, yet on gays in the Church he marches, if not shoulder to shoulder, in perilous proximity to the American Right.
George Walden The Times
