Every year the government takes £340 out of your household budget so that creepy crony capitalist Dale Vince can chop up more birds and bats with his wind turbines and bankroll his vegetarian football club.

This is the shocking revelation of a report by John Constable for the Global Warming Policy Forum, which finds that the cost of subsidising renewable energy in the UK has now risen to £9 billion per year – £340 per household.

The only reason it’s either a ‘revelation’ or ‘shocking’ is that the mainstream media just isn’t reporting on one of the most outrageous scams in the history of government-mandated fraud.

There is, as readers here are well aware, no economic or indeed environmental justification for the ruination of the British landscape with bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes, nor for any other form of taxpayer-subsidised unreliable energy.

Renewables are costing energy users billions of pounds to no useful purpose whatsoever, benefiting no one but the rent-seeking troughers canny or cynical or land-rich enough to have found a place for their snouts at the renewables swill tray.

In almost any other field this would be a major scandal, the subject of furious campaigning by an outraged media. But instead, how is Britain’s supposedly fearless fourth estate covering this story? Well, mainly it isn’t. Some papers that really ought to know better — that’ll be you Telegraph — actually run almost daily puff pieces promoting the wind industry.

Others, glibly run eco-propaganda stories like the one in today’s Sun headlined ‘Green Energy on Top for 1st time.’

Substitute the words ‘Tractor production’ for ‘Green Energy’ and you’d be back where this kind of story really belongs: in Soviet-Union-era Pravda.

Meanwhile, Britain’s struggling fracking industry has now effectively given up the ghost.

According to a report (£) in the Sunday Times:

Cuadrilla, the fracking company most active in England, has begun removing equipment from its only testing area after the work was blamed for minor earthquakes in August. There are no plans to continue at the Lancashire site, and an imminent energy white paper from the government is set to prioritise renewable energy over fracking, which blasts a mixture of water and chemicals into underground shale rock to release gas. Once lauded by David Cameron and George Osborne as a technique that would cut energy bills and create tens of thousands of jobs, fracking was losing political support even before the tremors at Cuadrilla’s site near Blackpool. Jamie Peters, a campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: “Fracking in the UK is now dead. Cuadrilla’s test drilling at Preston New Road was the flagship scheme — and it’s gone badly.

So a vociferous minority of green zealots has been able to close down an industry that could have created thousands of jobs, enriched local communities, brought down the cost of energy, boosted industry and increased energy security – just like it has in the U.S. And all because neither the conservative media nor the Conservative government have found themselves capable of presenting a convincing counter argument to the eco-loons’ relentless stream of shrill, mendacious propaganda.

This is a disgrace.

Right now, the environmental movement presents a target of barn-door size magnitude.

It is, as Brendan O’Neill notes with his usual trenchancy here, a conspiracy by the spoilt rich against the aspirational poor.

Extinction Rebellion gets posher by the day. Last week it was announced that the 1,300 agitators arrested in London included Princess Marie-Esméralda of Belgium, daughter of Leopold III. ‘The climate emergency calls on all of us to put pressure on governments to act with urgency’, she said. A little further down the aristocratic scale there is Tamsin Omond, the granddaughter of a baronet. She’s a former member of the implacably snobby anti-flying group Plane Stupid, whose website once denounced the ‘enormous growth in binge-flying’ and in particular the ‘proliferation of stag and hen nights to Eastern European destinations chosen not for their architecture or culture but because people can fly there for 99p and get loaded for a tenner’. Eurgh, those frightful oiks travelling around the world, how grotesque.

It is a movement characterised by the most outrageous ‘do as I say, not do as I do’ hypocrisy.

Here’s the Sun, this time on the right side of the argument:

A founder of the Extinction Rebellion protests has been accused of “blind hypocrisy” after it was revealed she had flown to Central America for a luxury holiday despite leading calls for a “rapid reduction” in air travel. Gail Bradbrook clocked up 11,000 air miles as she flew to Costa Rica for a week’s £2,500 stay at the New Life Iboga retreat then a week touring the tropical paradise.

It is a movement which wants to end economic growth – and the freedom of choice and prosperity that go with it – on the basis of junk science statistics, misleading statements and outright lies.

These lying, hysterical, freakish losers are completely in the wrong – and yet we are allowing them to dictate the terms of our energy economy and our political policy.

When will the fightback begin?