James Delingpole (left) of the Daily Telegraph is probably on holiday at the moment, which is lucky for him – because his triumphalist ranting about BP’s ‘harmless’ oil slick has turned out to be rather badly wrong.

It was a mistake for young James to lay on the ‘I told you so’ stuff with such a large trowel the week before last; that sort of writing is at best a hostage to fortune – and so it has proved. Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have now both measured and photographed a 22-mile plume of undersea oil in the Gulf. Over 300 feet down, it represents in the region of 79% of the BP oil spill – and punches an ozone-layer sized hole in Delingpole’s briskly asserted dispersal theory.

Now, oil escapes from the earth’s crust all the time, and I don’t doubt that bacteria just love to gorge on the stuff. But the reality is that James Delingpole is no more qualified or certain on the subject than I am: he’s just another gobby member of the ‘it is impossible for the human race to do any harm to the Earth at all’ Club. Which is just as deranged as the ‘we’re all going to die the year after next’ Society.

There is a broader canvas here, and I suspect Mr Delingpole would do better in observing it if he removed his nose from the paint. It is the year 2010, and as a species we have been unutterably crap at developing a clean energy form that works on an affordable mass-use basis. Our native inability has been strengthened by huge wads of lobbying cash from the oil business – and some pretty dubious bribes from time to time designed to derail any ideas about rendering the internal combustion engine obsolete.

The sheer profundity of our crapness is that we are now reduced to drilling miles under the oceans to stick pins in reservoirs, the containment of which once ruptured remains a mystery to us. Corrupt, negligent, short-sighted and dangerous business is the issue to be addressed here: this is about doing something for the species, rather than the ever-present sovereign shareholders.

Childish mud-slinging between the urban smart-arses and the open-toed earth-mothers is not going to solve anything, but it is boring everyone else shitless. Delingpole’s ideas on dispersal are bollocks and have been proven to be so. And the next person wittering on about how wind farms are The Very Thing will also get a flea in their ear from this column.