I'VE never been to a rainforest or a coral reef. I've seen a few polar bears, but they've been in captivity, or cartoons.

So when I talk to the 200 people at the national conference on climate change in Middlesbrough next week, I can't speak as a naturalist or scientist. I won't be giving a sermon either. As Al Gore's electricity bill shows, this is an area where there's a big difference between what we preach and what we practise.

I will be speaking as a consumer; and ultimately consumers will decide whether we cope with climate change.

Climate change is the potentially tragic sequel to mankind's greatest success story; how we won the three constant struggles that dominated the lives of our ancestors: the struggles for warmth, food and cleanliness. For millennia, all other achievements - the painting of the Sistine Chapel, the signing of the American Declaration of Independence - were incidental to meeting those three needs. If we failed, we died. We now take these necessities for granted.

We won by creating an urban and industrial society based on the prodigious use of fossil fuels. The same thing is happening now in the emerging world and in India and China. As a result, they are experiencing the huge and unregulated impact on social structures and environment that the Western world saw two centuries ago.

We cannot turn our own clock back; nor can we deny people in poorer countries the right to win their own struggle against weather, hunger and disease. We will continue to live in an industrialised society. We will continue to consume and produce. But we must do so differently.

The climate change debate has focused on doing less - leaving the car at home, switching off the light, turning down the central heating. We'll still have to do all these things. We must realise that they are finite resources.

But I hope that next week's debate will focus on how we can save energy and our futures by doing things differently. Developing greener, renewable energy sources from wind and solar power, plants and clean coal will allow us to progress, prosper even, but in a way which does not compromise our futures.

In Middlesbrough, we have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by one per cent every year for the past four years yet we have scarcely scratched the surface of the potential of hydrogen fuel cells and wind turbines.

We must mainstream energy sources like this. To do so we need government legislation to reward the development of renewable energy sources and innovation from industry and local government to develop and adopt them.

Most of all, we need pressure from consumers to create the demand and the markets for these products. If we don't, the consequences will be tragic, not just for trees and fish and polar bears, but for us all.

We live in an era that thrives on scare stories - from the millennium bug to avian flu, they come, they go and we survive. Don't fool yourself that climate change is the same. It is happening now and some of its effects are already irreversible. We are in a race against time with no guarantee of winning.

If we fail, it won't be case of "last one out, turn out the light". The light will have already failed, and our descendants will face the kind of existence our society has all but forgotten, but which our forefathers knew only too well.