On these pages I have previously remarked that the green energy lobby is not being entirely honest when they say that wind energy is the cheapest source. Their figures don’t include the cost of grid balancing or the billions we pay in subsidies. But then it struck me that there’s a massive extra cost staring us in the face.

The concept of a zero emissions grid is contingent on battery backup. The grid scale battery projects in the works come nowhere close to plugging the gaps and will only provide enough juice for a day or two at best, which is no good when the wind doesn’t blow much for weeks.

This is the reason they want us all in electric vehicles; so they can suck juice from car batteries to help balance the grid. Essentially, they want us to ditch our freedom of mobility and instead spend our money on an expensive mobile back up battery. That they perform a limited function as a short distance runabout is a secondary concern.

That means the rollout of EVs is very much an externality of wind energy. The vehicles, and the infrastructure to cope with EVs (and the inherent time costs to us) should be tallied as a cost of wind energy. They say EV’s are cheaper to run but they place no value on our time as we have to wait around at charging points.

As ever, the preening ideologues of Westminster and Whitehall don’t really care if Net Zero piles on costs for ordinary people and they have their Ukraine crisis to blame (for their decades of lamentable decisions). But there will be larger consequences.

Already some households are seeing energy bills eating up every spare penny of household income, forcing some difficult decisions. It will come to the point where poorer households simply won’t be able to keep pace with every demand on their budget. The price of food and energy is going up but greedy councils are grasping more money all the time in fines, levies and council tax. Council tax is creeping ever closer toward the £2000 mark – while councils maintain their grossly overpaid CEOs and diversity officers.

With that goes a rise in council tax arrears seeing the poorest and most vulnerable harassed by lawless bailiffs. It also sees poorer households turning to unregulated loan sharks. This is already happening, and councils do nothing. When bailiffs employ illegal practices councils turn a blind eye, as do the police, A substantial part of their income is pegged on hitting people with penalties. We’re going to see a massive uptick in Magistrates Liability Orders and advice services choked with complaints about bandit bailiffs. In all likelihood we will see young mothers turning to shoplifting and prostitution.

It is incumbent on any government to reduce its own financial footprint on the household budget, but instead greedy councils see the public as cash cows to prop up their grubby little fiefdoms, and like their Westminster counterparts, they don’t think twice about how much misery they subject the taxpayer to. As usual you pay more but get less.

Net Zero was a terrible, unworkable idea at the best of times, but following two years of calamitous Covid policy and decades of policy neglect in energy (exacerbated by Ukraine), we simply cannot afford to entertain the adolescent delusions of green policy wonks and faux Conservative MPs. Now more than ever we need local government focussing on the essentials, and central government should be looking to any and all source of fossil fuels which underpin our economy.

When ideologies born of middle class anxieties about the weather start interfering with even basic living standards, demoting us to serfs while robbing us blind, we are turning a dark corner. We cannot afford the narcissism of our political class, and the longer this goes on, the more we will start to see society fraying at the edges. Unless the nation wakes up to this peril and votes UKIP, MPs will soon have more than just mean tweets to contend with.