“Renewable resources are highly innovative – they create new products, fight against poverty and hence create new jobs in agriculture, mechanical engineering, in energy and the chemical industries,” Fell said.

“The fossil and atomic energy system must be phased out and must be converted to a complex renewable energy system.

“Precisely because the global economy is so fundamentally dependent on oil and other fossil fuels, it must develop another resource base very quickly.

“Otherwise, the increasing depletion of oil and gas resources, the drastic rise in oil and gas prices, and the simultaneous exacerbation of the global environmental crisis will precipitate an unprecedented worldwide economic crisis.”

The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas predicted global oil and gas extraction would peak within the next 10 years and increased Asian demand, particularly from China, would lead to a major international economic crisis unless the world shifted rapidly towards renewable energy, according to Fell.

Fossil-fuel driven climate change disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, had already caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage, and the looming worldwide shortage of oil and gas would lead to more and more conflicts over raw materials, he argued.

“The Iraq war was a war for oil,” Fell said.

“We are facing oil wars in Sudan, Nigeria and other countries. The very dangerous crisis in Iran is also due to energy problems.

“One can also see human rights problems in regions with oil and gas pipelines, oil fields, coal and uranium mining.”

Fell said the natural supply of renewables offered “many thousand times” the world’s entire annual energy requirements.

Even in resource-poor Japan, current and future energy demand could be supported by renewables. New Zealand, with its already high proportion of renewables, could fully switch to renewables, although the shift might take decades.

However, energy companies are fighting hard against renewable energy and Germany’s two largest utilities, Eon and RWE, are currently being investigated over bribery of local politicians, according to Fell.

“They fear to lose the main role to sell energy,” he said.

“They fight with disinformation, which leads to the problem that public and political opinion is not informed on the success and the further possibilities of renewables.”