First a confession. I am genuinely and unequivocally looking forward to the World Cup in South Africa. I’d be a bigger hypocrite than usual if I tried to deny it. A whole month of football mania slap bang on top of the climax to the current Premier League and UEFA Championships. What joy. And by the time its all over the big clubs will be gearing up for their pre-season friendlies. The circus never ends. Drip, drip, drip. The addiction will be fed with barely a break. Oh yes, I’ll feign disinterest and reel off a few lines of cynical detachment but make no mistake, just below that veneer of cynicism lies that little boy from 1966. ‘They think it’s all over’. and all that stuff. I’ll be hooked, don’t worry about that!

Without a ball being kicked the pundits have already got England into the quarterfinals with a likely encounter with Ghana or perhaps even the old enemy herself. I know these things because I’ve taken out a free subscription to the FIFA soap opera that will take all our minds off the looming environmental crisis that is progressively engulfing our lovely little planet. You know the story by now. Our once beautiful rivers now oozing toxins and dying in front of our very eyes. Chronic water shortages becoming the order of the day. Droughts, floods and hurricanes-more frequent and more deadly. Everywhere, weather patterns becoming more extreme. Global population growing relentlessly and things starting to run out. We’re entering the era of Peak Oil though nobody quite believes it. Species dying out by the bucket loads and soon the only living things left will be us humans and a few billion mutating viruses.

It’s an all too familiar scenario. We know we’re cooking the planet but the forces that have driven us to the point of catastrophe just won’t relinquish the controls. We could stop the industrial polluters just as we could stop the bankers, but we don’t. Something in the human psyche says, ‘why do today what we can do tomorrow’. Katrina down in New Orleans should have been a loud enough warning but somehow we passed it off as just one of those big storms.

The photographs of melting icecaps ought to be a final wake-up call but for most of us the polar regions are just too far away. Better to focus on the World Cup draw that signals the start of a six month global circus rather than get bogged down with CO2 emissions. Fifty billion tons of the stuff pumped into the atmosphere every year is just a trifle when compared with the serious business of avoiding the ‘group of death’. A new coal fired power station coming on line every week in China is nothing compared with the injustice of Ireland missing out on World cup qualification at the hands of Thierry Henry.

A third runway at Heathrow allowing for 400,000 extra flights is hardly world news when set against the dismal World Cup record of England. Wars fought over water shortages pale into insignificance when set against the national rivalries that will erupt in South Africa come June next year. And that Africa is a continent bleeding to death under the crippling weight of debt repayments, endemic poverty and civil wars; much of which can be attributed to the legacy of European colonialism, is but a detail, when one remembers that the glorious FIFA World Cup has finally arrived in Africa-the very womb of mankind.

We should not worry. FIFA has just delicately suggested that the Premier League should donate some £34 million towards an education programme in the developing world. Praise be that FIFA have a social conscience.

PS. The Premier league declined their suggestion.