These priorities are incompatible, though our leaders have proved themselves adept at fudging the issues. You cannot continue to subsidise nuclear and renewables, plus the back-up conventional capacity needed to support them, while keeping prices low — especially when conventional energy prices are low and going lower. As for getting a deal in Paris at the next UN climate change conference in November: it is unlikely that the really large carbon producers, China and India, will commit themselves to restrictions that would level the playing field for our already-hamstrung industries.

If Parliament repealed the Climate Change Act, followed, one hopes, by the Energy Act, the British economy would be freed from a straitjacket that dooms it to paying ever-higher prices. Cured — cold turkey — from their addiction to subsidy, power generators would be free to make rational commercial decisions — which in a competitive market would mean a tendency to drive prices down. Renewable power technologies would be forced to compete properly. The hyper-expensive ones would have to go back to the drawing board, but the cheaper technologies would have an incentive to get their costs down to realistic levels. This is already happening with solar, due mainly to the huge Chinese investment in producing photovoltaic panels. It could happen with wind, though not for a few years. The point is that the progression to a lower-carbon future would not be at the cost of our economy, and it would happen organically and not on the artificial timetable dictated by the CCA and its high priests at the CCC.

This, of course, is unlikely to happen quickly, or even at all. It would take a political reaction as powerful as the terrific green concert party that led us to the CCA 2008 and the world into the interminable global climate negotiations. At present the British public is split, though it is fair to say that the majority accept the reality of man-made global warming and the need to do something about it. However, the minority is a substantial one, and numbers are growing. Their position is similar to that of the Eurosceptics a few years ago: numerous, disgruntled and ignored by the political establishment.

In Britain, the worm may just turn with the launch of shale fracking later this year. Applications by the specialist exploration company Cuadrilla to drill in Lancashire are expected to be approved soon, and the first results should be in by December. The Bowland shale is twice the thickness of the largest American shale reserves. Success would change the terms of the game. A new and abundant source of cheap natural gas — not to mention oil — would force the nation to reassess its priorities.