In February, a group of business leaders (including Richard Branson) came together to issue the government a warning: we’ve had the credit crisis, the next crisis will be a peak oil crisis.

Their message to government was to stop listening to the over-exuberance of oil companies who promised great things from their upstream operations and start thinking seriously about how to move away from the UK’s dependence on oil.

Now they have repeated that call, with an additional warning: Macondo has made the situation even more pressing.