In his great novel Nostromo, Joseph Conrad (a Polish outsider in the British merchant marine) shrewdly observed the fatal British propensity for high-minded action, however ill-directed. Charles Gould has inherited a bankrupt silver mine in Sulaco, a corrupt South American country. He is determined to resurrect the mine and use the wealth to rescue Sulaco.

The mine had been the cause of an absurd moral disaster; its working must be made a serious and moral success. Decoud, a journalist who will later become one of its chief victims when the plan goes awry, says to Mrs Gould:

"But, then, don't you see, he's an Englishman?"

"Well, what of that?" asked Mrs. Gould.

"Simply that he cannot act or exist without idealising every simple feeling, desire, or achievement. He could not believe his own motives if he did not make them first a part of some fairy tale. The earth is not quite good enough for him, I fear."

This is emblematic of the obsession with global warming and the need to reduce carbon emissions which has seized the British body politic since 2000. Of course it was driven by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the various green pressure groups and their initially unchallenged command of the media. And it is true that the European Union as a whole also embraced this ideology, and instituted far-reaching structural changes to national electricity markets, indeed began to do so well before the UK did.

But there was something blind and obsessive about the way successive British governments took on the challenge. It has been characterised by a total focus on increasing the use of renewables while ignoring the rest. There has been a particular failure to understand the many advantages to the UK of using gas-fired power, despite its central role in reducing power prices and ensuring energy security over the past two decades.

In May 2007, the ignoble Lord Truscott, energy minister and Labour placeman, presented a White Paper on energy which set the sorry standard for government self-deception and double think on this vital topic. At the press launch I thumbed through the 344 pages of verbiage on the green and sustainable future envisaged for us. Among the delirious projections for 2030 and 2050 I sought in vain for any word on what would fill the generation gap looming in the decade after 2010: the immediate future in energy investment terms. There was nothing. I infuriated Truscott by suggesting to him that natural gas was the fuel that dare not speak its name.

Afterwards I spoke to a couple of the civil servants who had actually written the White Paper. "Why doesn't it say anything about the new gas-fired generation that will have to be built to keep the lights on during the next decade?" They grinned conspiratorially, and replied that if not explicit it was implicit in the analysis. Which would be fine if it had happened, but it hasn't.