This week, Lord Turner of Ecchinswell paused from threatening the City as chairman of the Financial Services Authority to seek, as boss of the Green Fiscal Commission, a re-balancing of the tax system against carbon, even to the tune of a £3,300 levy on new cars.

He said it would not lead to more overall taxation.

If you believe that in view of Gordon Brown's gargantuan debt legacy, you will believe anything.

Last week, the PM said we had only 50 days to save the planet. That was 50 days after Prince Charles, speaking in advance of the great UN global warming jamboree in Copenhagen, in December, gave us the 100-day warning.

Yesterday, Lord Stern, the author of the Government's 2006 review on climate change, urged people to become vegetarian today, to help beat global warming. He said methane emissions from cows and pigs were putting "enormous pressure" on the world, and people needed to think about what they ate.

Next week, no doubt, Nobel Peace prizewinner Al Gore will emerge with a new vision of New York under water, Britain half-drowned and the Commonwealth minus a member – the Maldives.

It is all a load of baloney.

Back during the Great Storm of 1987, I well recall President Gayoom, of the Maldives, telling Margaret Thatcher at the Vancouver Commonwealth conference that if she didn't do something smartish about global warming, the Commonwealth would soon be short of an entire nation.

Recently, the administration that succeeded him was driven to staging a ludicrous stunt to get its hands on more Western cash – holding a cabinet meeting under the waves – since nothing has happened in 22 years to sink the islands' tourist business. I do not wish to enter the argument over whether any global warming is man-made or a natural phenomenon. Nobody knows – in spite of the hysteria that scientists, waxing fat on government research contracts, have generated since capturing Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s.

In the great sweep of climatic time, a warming since the 1970s or a cooling since 1998, is meaningless. But if the dubious theory that the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere acts as a planetary duvet, with long-term consequences for climate and nature, we should clearly try to temper its emission.

There is no point in making things worse for our grandchildren. Nor is there any point in impoverishing ourselves in the process. So it comes down to what we can do effectively and economically.

The truth is that, given the foreseeable global reliance on fossil fuels, we are strapped for solutions. Certainly, we should try to minimise our energy consumption, if only to save ourselves money. But so-called remedial measures do not come cheap, assuming they are remotely useful.

Taking the carbon out of coal through its capture and sequestration in strata under the North Sea is a mere theoretical possibility, but we already know it could double the price of electricity. Renewables, whether wind, waves, tides or solar, are marginal, ineffective and so expensive that they have to be grossly subsidised.

It is sheer political madness to contemplate saddling consumers with a £100bn bill for more wind turbines when they make such a poor fist of reducing carbon emissions because they are intermittent.

David Cameron could instantly prove his managerial competence with £1 trillion-plus debt round his neck by killing subsidised wind power on the morrow of entering No 10.

For all these reasons, I hope that President Obama declines to go to Copenhagen. The whole tawdry climate game, with its carbon pricing, capping and offset scams, needs to be brought crashing down about the ears of the fanatics running it so that common sense is at last brought to bear on the problem.

The first requirement is for the debate about global warming's causes to be opened up instead of closed down. The second is for the public to be objectively informed what are the best buys – for example, nuclear – in the mitigation business. In other words, the people should be told what gives value for money since they have to finance it.

The third is for the Green zealots who seek to change the world to be stopped from using supposed risks to the climate to shame the "guilty" West to hand over more of its allegedly ill-gotten gains to nations that are poor only because they are badly and corruptly run.

Never in the field of human endeavour did so many need so few to see sense to prevent the world bankrupting itself again to no purpose.