Carbon emissions are rising by record amounts, stoked by political inaction and fossil fuel subsidies. We are almost out of time to douse the climate change crisis!

The house is ablaze and we are throwing bucket after bucket at it - buckets of petrol. Worse, if that is possible, the world’s politicians are not stepping in to stop us stoking the flames: instead they are helping us pay for the petrol.

That simple, devastating analogy captures entirely the current global action on climate change. Despite warnings from scientists that have been clear for years, the globe is not curbing its carbon emissions: they are rising by record amounts. We are not even getting more efficient in our use of fossil fuels to power our economies, we are now getting worse. And the rising subsidies poured into fossil fuels swamp those for clean energy by six to one.

The previous charge made against the world’s leaders - you are not moving forward fast enough - failed to spark action. Will the new message - you are now reversing at speed towards a hellish future - change that? The UN negotiations on a global climate change agreement, reconvening in Durban shortly, will be the first test of whether this new reality has sunk in.

But, with tackling global warming tumbling down the agenda with politicians transfixed by economic crisis, the omens are gloomy. The new warning this Wednesday from the International Energy Agency, a deeply conservative organisation, could not be more stark. Unless we shift the global energy supertanker off its current, dirty course by 2017, we will have locked in enough greenhouse gas pollution to condemn the world to a temperature rise above the 2C deemed “safe” by governments. Yet the best aspirations for Durban look utterly inadequate. UK’s climate change minister Greg Barker recently said having a global climate deal ready to “click in” by 2020 was realistic.

The IEA predict a temperature rise of 3.5C if current energy policies around the world are delivered but no more. That means a future world of mass migration, severe water shortages and England having the summer climate of Morocco today. If those policies fail to materialise, the IEA predicts 6C. That’s Armageddon: large parts of the planet uninhabitable and the risk of runaway warming threatening the rest.

So what to do? The IEA says the wide difference between these scenarios and one that limits warming to 2C “underlines the critical role of governments to define the objectives and implement the policies necessary to shape our energy future.” The current silence on tackling the energy crisis and climate change from Prime Minister David Cameron and the antipathy from Chancellor George Osborne is simply shameful. The investment needed for a clean energy future is already huge and is made yet more expensive by political uncertainty.

With the economies of developed nations stagnant, some are pleading poverty as an excuse for inaction. But, says the IEA, “delaying action is a false economy”. It states that avoiding $1 of energy investment before 2020 will require $4.30 to compensate after that date.

If money needs to be saved, start with the $409bn gifted to the fossil fuel industry in 2010 in subsidies. The G20 backed this idea in 2009 but has yet to deliver. The subsidies do not enable the impoverished to access energy: just 8% of the subsidies reach the world’s poorest 20% of people. Renewable energy, the only truly sustainable source of power, received just $66bn of support last year, and even the IEA thinks this will rise to no more than $180bn by 2035.

There’s plenty more that ought to spur action in the IEA report. It predicts the oil cartel Opec will get more powerful and Russia will be confirmed as the “cornerstone” of the world’s energy economy, with all that implies for energy security in importing countries. The IEA also foresees a “golden age of gas”, replete with environmental challenges and with 20% coming from the fracking of shale.

The UK’s first planned carbon capture and storage demonstration plant may have collapsed in farce, but making CCS technology work by the 2020s is critical, says the IEA. “If not,” says the report, “an extraordinary burden would rest on other low-carbon technologies.” New nuclear power plants must be built, the IEA says, especially in emerging economies.

The IEA acknowledges some “steps in the right direction”, but the central message is a deafening alarm.

If you thought that tackling the red-hot issue of cleaning up energy now was tantamount to burning money, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Without urgent and transformative action, today’s conflagrations will seem like stray sparks compared to the wildfires to come.