Green delusions in the UK.....

In the US too....

Mr Brown seems particularly excited by the idea that we should all drive electric cars, and inevitably everyone has been piling in to point out what a farce this is. Last year sales of all-electric cars in Britain fell to just 179. The Indian G-Wiz, much fancied by Mr Brown and Boris Johnson, costs up to £15,795 for a vehicle which can only travel rather slowly for 75 miles before its battery needs several hours of recharging.

Astonishingly, Mr Brown does not seem to have asked himself where all this planet-saving electricity is to come from. As Professor Stanley Fieldman explained in a letter in Friday's Daily Telegraph, it comes of course from the National Grid, 75 per cent powered by fossil fuels. Taking account of transmission losses, by the time the electricity gets to one of those 25,000 charging points Boris plans to provide all over London, its CO2 emissions would be nearly twice those of the equivalent amount of diesel.

Rather less attention has been given to how Mr Brown thinks he can create the rest of those 400,000 "green jobs". Thanks to an excellent analysis by Ben Pile on The Register website, showing the Government's own calculations, we can see how this is even more of a pipe dream than those toy cars.

For instance, the Government apparently thinks that, by 2015, 39,600 new jobs will be created in "geothermal energy", 74,900 in making "alternative fuels", 25,300 in making energy from the sun and another 69,300 in erecting wind turbines.

Of course this is all just babyish make-believe. Thanks to the drying up of credit and the collapsing pound (most of the technology has to be bought from abroad), our "renewables industry" is now in such a crisis that five of Britain's largest wind projects have recently been abandoned or put on hold, while BP is axing 620 jobs from its solar energy division because it is so uneconomic.

That "£100 billion green energy package" announced by Mr Brown last year, according to the Department for Energy and Climate Change, would raise the 14 per cent of our electricity bills we already pay for "renewables" to 32 per cent. For industry it will be 55 per cent. Each of the 25,000 new jobs the Government hopes to create in "waste management", Mr Pile shows, will cost us £1.2 million. But there is not the faintest hope that most of this will happen.

Similarly, President Obama, also fixated on electric cars, boasted last November how he planned to save the US economy by creating "five million green jobs". Yet a study by Duke University, partly financed by warmist lobby groups, claims that the five main sources of all those new jobs will be "LED lighting", "high perfomance windows", "auxiliary power units for long-haul trucks", "solar power" and "super soil systems, or new technology for treating hog wastes". As I observed at the time, the only way Mr Obama could create his new jobs would be to erect giant treadmills and employ five million Americans to run up and down generating power.

Is it really on this kind of hard-headed calculation that, in the minds of those who rule us, the future of the US and British economies now rests?

Truly is our western civilisation now slipping over the edge in more ways than one.