In the last couple of decades a third set of players have started muscling in on this special relationship. These are the well-intentioned reformers from green parties around the world, vociferously supported by the woolly-minded fringes of the global alternative movement who believe that a United Nations led coalition of right-thinking Non-Governmental Organisations can grab the reins of our emerging One World Government and impose upon ordinary people the type of regime that Aidan Rankin in The Politics of The Forked Tongue refers to as 'authoritarian liberalism'. These noble souls truly believe that a planetary paradise will arise some day from the ashes of the fossil fuel age if they impose their version of Earth Summit and Kyoto Agreements on intransigent transnational corporations, reverse the clauses in the World Trade Organisation statutes and ban the burning of coal, oil and natural gas in cars, homes and businesses. They have a dream in which our hills are alive with the sound of wind mills and fields are full to overflowing with fuel crops instead of opium poppies. To find out all there is to know about this Third Energy Way you could do worse than struggle through the europrose in Hermann Scheer's compendium on The Solar Economy translated from the German original, Solare Weltwirtschaft, penned three years ago.

But recently a fourth set of players has started gearing up to launch itself upon an unsuspecting world. So unsuspecting in fact that despite privileged access to leading edge research as a member of the Deutsche Bundestag, President of the European Association for Renewable Energy, and General Chairman of the World Council of Renewable Energy, as recently as 1999 Hermann Scheer regarded the hydrogen fuel cell technology at the heart of the proposed new energy infrastructure to be no more than a rather inefficient way to store wind farm electricity surpluses. This may now have changed as there is clearly big money behind Jeremy Rifkin's ambitious attempt in The Hydrogen Economy to demonstrate that the reverse is the case. Rifkin believes that hydrogen will be at the heart of the future energy economy and that solar energy will be just one of several poor relations.

In clearing the ground for his sales pitch, Rifkin does a first rate job of pointing out the reasons that the oil and nuclear emperors have no clothes. And in doing so he also exposes the ignorance and arrogance of the Texan oil barons and provides powerful insights into the out-moded thought patterns pervading what Dwight Eisenhower once called, with strong misgiving, his military industrial complex. Edgy in the knowledge that al-Quaida is not the vast mysterious and formidable spectre, fiendishly capable, fabulously rich and incredible cunning, portrayed by their political paymasters, America's military planners twitch nervously in the certain knowledge that they will soon be fighting the wrong war in the wrong place against the wrong enemy. Meanwhile America's vast army of military contractors rampage through the global economy, punch-drunk from the massive budget increases nodded through the American Congress with hardly a dissenting voice after the dramatic events of 11th September 2001 and the subsequent puffing up of al-Quaeda and the invention of the Osama bin Laden legend. Here is the provenance of Rifkin's proposals.