All this ?sustainable island? hokum is seriously beginning to rub me the wrong way. More than three months since Rama Sithanen gave his star turn as a wannabe Nicolas Hulot in the Budget speech, we still have nothing to show for all the pretty green-tinged verbiage. More perplexing still, the renewable energies dossier has been given to Rashid Beebeejaun, a man who seems about as keen on clean energy as a teenager on homework. That?s another good few months wasted, at the very least.

In the meantime, world markets are crashing and the price of oil is going up, up, up (thank goodness for life?s small mercies!). Another small mercy comes in the form of the new minister of Environment, Lormus Bundhoo. Despite being a complete novice to the sector, he seems intent enough to give a new lease of life to the ministry. To accomplish this though, he will have to ensure that his voice is heard at government level, even if this means getting on the wrong side of some of his colleagues. To claim that his predecessor, Anil Bachoo, believed in the timeless virtues of inertia would be a massive understatement.

Despite not being the be-all and end-all of making Mauritius sustainable, renewable energies are a vital component of the project. Moreover, the country is ideally placed to exploit them. In our quest to increase our energy security, we could do far worse than to rip a page or two out of Portugal?s little green book. Long derided as a backwater of Europe, Portugal is at the forefront of the renewable energy revolution. As well as trebling its hydro-electric capacity and quadrupling its wind power sources in recent years, it launched the world?s first commercial wave-power farm a few days ago.

?Finland is very good in mobile phones. Portugal wants to be good in renewable energy. Renewable energy is the source of energy for the future and we think this can create an industrial revolution and a lot of opportunities for jobs and research and we want to be ahead of the curve?, ?The Guardian? reported Portugal?s Economy minister, Manuel Pinho, as saying during the launch.

Admittedly, the Iberian country has the enormous advantage of being able to tap into European Union funds for its projects. It?s worth noting however that Mauritius has also been the recipient of a non-negligible amount of European cash. This money should be spent on achieving a higher degree of food and energy independence. For all the government?s belief in the merits of free trade, it?s a sad yet incontrovertible fact that no such thing exists. The biggest champions of free trade, such as the United States and Europe, all spend an obscene amount of currency on subsidizing their exports.

If the authorities don?t get their act together soon, it?s going to be a long hard slog before anything is done in terms of renewables. Each minute lost prevaricating puts a dent in the country?s ability to pre-empt an energy crisis. ?I?d put my money on the sun and on solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don?t have to wait ?til oil and coal run out before we tackle that?, wrote the inventor Thomas Edison at the turn of the last century.

The powers-that-be seem intent on doing just that.