In the Telegraph yesterday, an editorial only somewhat rightly claims: ‘The global scramble for cheap energy exposes Britain’s folly.’ Other governments, it observes, are making moves to correct the green agenda. “Trump has acted to strengthen America’s role in energy markets,” it explains, “by contrast the British Government seemingly does everything in its power to worsen our energy position.” The framing here is security, based largely around events in Ukraine, Venezuela and China, and it has two major flaws. First, the newspaper’s desire to get Britain further entangled in geopolitics is no positive answer to Net Zero nonsense – it just trades one urgent necessity for some other form of moral blackmail. Second, it might just as well make the argument for more wind and solar farms on the same basis. The proper answer to the green agenda needs to understand green ideology in its entirety.

What is the green agenda? For some sceptics, it is simply that somehow, some bad science got into the political process. On this view, once climate science’s errors are corrected, we can return to business-as-usual. But a deeper, longer and broader view of the green movement reveals that to be a misapprehension. The biggest flaws in the green agenda preceded climate alarmism and persisted. The neo-Malthusian end-of-the-world demographic predictions of the 1970s failed, but were rescued by global warming hypotheses in the 1980s and 90s.