In New York, G8 finance ministers fretted over the damage today's high oil price, if sustained, could inflict on the global economy. Ministers urged producer countries to puncture the price bubble by increasing supplies.

In Amsterdam Opec members agreed to disagree about their response, at least until their next full meeting in Beirut on June 3.

The largest producer by far in the 11-country cartel, Saudi Arabia, is determined to raise its own output unilaterally. The rest are refusing to dance to Riyadh's tune.

Amidst such conflicting signals, the price of bechmark crude in New York yesterday was once more testing 21-year record highs. It is hard to see where any serious downward pressure on the oil price is going to come from. Indeed there are growing worries that the price could go higher still in the months ahead.

Some Opec members are openly disputing that this is, fundamentally, a supply problem. They point to intense market speculation and mounting security concerns in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East as plausible alternative explanations for the price soaring.

In any case, most Opec members are already pumping as much oil as their current production capacity allows. Even the Saudis, with almost all the spare capacity within Opec, are already thought to be producing well beyond existing quotas. There is no guarantee that raising the cartel's quotas by up to 2.5 million barrels a day, as Riyadh is urging, will turn out to be anything more than another cosmetic exercise.

Some observers argue that - whatever the precise dynamics of this oil price spike - producers and consumers will sort the problem out in the end. It may take time. Quite a long time. We may end up with higher average prices than we've been used to. Governments may have to tax fossil fuel less, in future, to prevent permanent damage to their economies. But the problem will eventually be fixed.

However, that analysis tends to slide over two inconvenient consequences of our dependency on the black stuff. Oil is a finite resource and we are discovering fewer fresh reserves of the stuff than we used to. And burning oil has had a deleterious impact on our environment, an impact that can only get worse if major emerging economies like China realise their desire to burn even more of it.

Even if most Opec members don't see this as a supply problem, the fact that demand for a finite resource is rising sharply in newly industrialising nations, many of them in Asia, is inevitably going to put more and more pressure - real and speculative - on the price.

There are intermediate supply constraints that can be fixed - faster exploitation of proven reserves and additional refining capacity, for instance. But with Asia expected to double its electricity consumption by 2020 and Shell yet again downgrading its estimates of proven reserves, it's not hard to find the singals that point to deeper pressures.

China, we are told, is planning to build as much additional electricity-generating capacity in the next couple of years (most of it fossil-fuelled) as the UK's entire power station network.

An Indian power group is even talking about dismantling the redundant oil-fired station at Inverkip and shipping it off for reassembly in Gujarat.Inverkip was built on the back of the North Sea production boom, with a view to further diversifying sources of electricity supply. But the oil price shocks of the 1970s rendered it too expensive to operate. Only in 1984, during the miners' strike, did Inverkip do a turn and help Margaret Thatcher see off Arthur Scargill.

However, in the fast-changing global energy environment, even redundant Inverkip may have a significant market value. But if the world burns all the oil it can get, what value do we ascribe to the environmental impact all that accelerated burning of fossil fuel will have on our planet?

The eminent environmentalist Professor James Lovelock has just shocked his many admirers in the green movement by suggesting, in yesterday's Independent, that the only answer to halt global warming is to invest heavily once more in nuclear power.

Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, has become so alarmed by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the extreme heat experienced in parts of Europe last August, that he has said the previously unsayable. There is "no chance" that renewables can provide enough alternative energy sources or produce them in time. "Civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear - the one safe, available energy source - now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet," he warns.

This oil crunch may indeed be very different from those of the 1970s. But it is no less important for that. It is begging some of the biggest questions of all - like how we balance our material aspirations against the very survival of Planet Earth.