Most conflicts have their profiteers – the black market traders exploiting shortages and arms dealers who play both sides for personal gain. If the latter don't actually create conflict by flooding a region with weapons, they'll readily perpetuate existing conflicts.

History's most famous profiteer is probably the fictional, archetypal American capitalist Milo Minderbender, from Joseph Heller's acidic satire on world war two, Catch-22. He strikes deals with the Germans and, in search of financial return, organises for his own airbase and comrades to be bombed.

In a twisted parallel to Minderbender's amoral machinations, the UK government is playing both sides of the climate conflict.

Rather than being flooded by military hardware, when water deluged swaths of England last month, years of ideologically driven policy on austerity was seemingly ditched when the prime minister, David Cameron, declared: "Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed, we will spend it." He went beyond his own environment secretary in linking the floods to climate change.

Less than two weeks later, Cameron again created the impression that money was no object. But this time, it wasn't to tackle global warming, but rather to ensure that the climate will continue to be destabilised. He announced measures worth up to £200bn in effective subsidy for the North Sea oil and gas industry resulting in the production of 3-4bn more barrels of oil "than would otherwise have been produced".

It is like promising to rebuild Dresden while ordering more bombers to flatten it again. There is a kind of closed-loop madness in which the only certainty is that massive amounts of money are being spent to both create disaster and are needed to clean up after it. From the vantage point of the Somerset Levels, you'd be forgiven for thinking that neither state nor market has exactly cracked the optimal allocation of resources needed to solve the nation's – or world's – problems.

Our big banks, underwritten by the public but operating according to a reward system of extortionate private gain, are the embodiment of this problem.

When the majority state-owned RBS – which lends massive amounts of support to the fossil fuel industries – handed out nearly £600m in bonuses in spite of making a loss of more than £8bn, it was merely one example of a still unsolved systemic failing.

Across the sector, if bonuses this year match those of last, it will bring to £80bn the amount paid out since the crisis exploded in 2008.

Oddly, and awkwardly, it's about the same amount as the government's planned cuts to public spending between 2010-15.

But while that squeeze progresses, there was no drop in bankers' share of earnings from the peak of the boom in 2007 to mid-crisis 2011.

While the renewable energy sector struggles amid regulatory and policy uncertainty, the oil and gas industry enjoys cheerleaders at the heart of government environmental policymaking. Yet, going as far back as the campaign to abolish slavery, we have known that in order to cure the economy of an unacceptable dependency we have to remove subsidies from what was wrong, regulate against the wrong and shift investment to positive alternatives.

But at the moment, this is a world in which Joseph Heller might have written a book called Climate-22. England and Wales have just had the wettest winter since records began and the world is on course for catastrophic climate change.

But don't worry, Nigel Lawson is getting equal billing on the BBC again, as if his views are as informed and valuable as the climate scientists he derides. And, heck, what does it matter anyway? Any Milo Minderbender can see that there's money to be made from civilisation falling apart.

www.onehundredmonths.org