The other is the even more costly plan to bribe a few gas-fired power stations to continue running, so long as all their CO2 emissions are piped off to be buried in holes under the North Sea, by a technology not yet developed and which almost certainly never will be.

So carried away into cloud cuckoo land have been all those responsible for our energy policy that Mrs Leadsom now proposes that we should go literally for broke. If our existing policy is like committing suicide by taking ever larger doses of paracetamol, she now wants us to make doubly sure by knocking back a cup of cyanide.

"Leadsom conveniently forgets that the Paris agreement committed no one to anything."

What makes this even more bizarre is that, in doing so, she somehow believes that our “world-leading Climate Change Act” will set an example for all other countries to follow. She wants Britain to be the first to meet that wholly fictitious “Paris goal”, by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to zero. She conveniently forgets that the Paris agreement committed no one to anything.

China, India and many other countries are planning to build hundreds more coal-fired power stations (of which we will soon have none at all), in a way that will guarantee a further huge leap in the world’s “carbon emissions”, to which our own contribution is now only 1.2 per cent. At least when lemmings jump over a cliff, they are all supposed to do it together. Mrs Leadsom and the rest of our politicians seem happy that we should be the only one.