Bernard Ingham: We must win this vital power struggle or be destroyed as an industrial nation

He is not alone. The entire political resources of the continent, including the UK, are up the creek without an outboard motor, as it were.

The reason is very simple. They have put their sacred mission to save the planet from the allegedly frying consequences of carbon dioxide (CO2) before a government’s fundamental duty to ensure a secure supply of affordable energy – and especially electricity.

Without it, life as we know it would become impossible. Society as well as the economy would collapse without instant energy at the flick of a switch and the turn of a tap. The devil would take the hindmost – the weak, the vulnerable and all those whom a civilised society is supposed to protect.

In short, our politicians are running severe risks with our future because they have succumbed to Green hysteria, even though the evidence for runaway global warming becomes ever more elusive.

I am not referring to this interminably cold Spring. Anybody who has lived in this sceptred isle for the last 50 years knows how the weather can vary widely from year to year. Instead, while CO2 levels climb past the 400 parts per million mark, the average global temperature has been stuck for a good 15 years.

It seems that either the Greens’ computer models are rubbish or they have been feeding them with it.

Things have got so bad that 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts have given the agency’s administrator a magisterial ticking off for allowing its Goddard Institute for Space Studies to indulge in alarmism. ”With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, it is clear that the science is NOT settledm” they wrote.

“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”

I am not sure this will do the spacemen much good other than to get them dismissed, like myself, as climate change “deniers”. The problem is that our politicians are so greenwashed that sap not blood flows through their veins.

The result is one warning after another about the risk of power cuts in the UK. In Germany, where they have shut eight nuclear power stations and are phasing the industry out altogether by 2022, industry is alarmed by the threat of unreliable electricity as they go a bundle on wind and solar power.

Already variations in the frequency of electricity supplies are reported to have done expensive damage to continuous manufacturing processes.

But it is much more serious than that. The politicians are presiding over the possible de-industrialisation of Europe, not to mention the UK. On their own admission, energy prices in Europe are now 37 per cent higher than in the USA and even 20 per cent dearer than in Japan, where the Fukushima tsunami disaster has virtually closed down its major nuclear power industry, forcing the country to rely on fossil fuels.

A steady stream of European manufacturers is reported planning to move their operations to the USA, even though the Obama administration is just as barmy about global warming while enjoying a shale gas bonanza. It is at least cheaper there.

Yet still Mr Rabbitte and his blinkered kind cannot see what to do. Actually, it is simple. To start with, we can do without uneconomic wind, solar, wave, tidal and biomass power which cost the earth in subsidies, often wreck the landscape and do virtually nothing to cut carbon emissions.

Instead, the remedy is staring us in the face. Old technology works. Coal, gas and nuclear power keep the lights on and the wheels of industry turning economically. They are even Scargill-proof.

And the more nuclear power you have, the more coal and gas you can burn since nuclear emits next to no CO2. You also buy yourself time for R&D to make energy supply cleaner.

If Mr Rabbitte and his Euro-colleagues cannot see this, then we are in real trouble. I fear it will get worse before it gets better. This week Britain is trying to bring in tougher EU CO2 reduction targets. Ye Gods!