The government's green ambition is dead, choked by the exhaust fumes and chimneystack smog belched out by the chancellor's desperate and wrong-headed attempt to restart the economy's engine

It's official: the government's ambition to be the greenest ever is dead, choked by the exhaust fumes and chimneystack smog belched out in the desperate attempt to restart the economy's engine.

In rhetoric of unprecedented contempt, the chancellor George Osborne cast aside the last of the pretence that permitted him to claim just two years' ago that he would be a green ally, not a foe."

How utterly empty that sentiment is now, and how damaging is that which replaces it: cutting carbon kills jobs; endless social and environmental goals lead to poverty; protecting the countryside is a ridiculous cost on business. And what a false economy. On a finite planet, the eventual coming of a sustainable economy is a certainty: what we can choose is how we get there.

Osborne has chosen the slash-and-burn route, bloating our environmental debt, just as his failure to create growth has bloated our economic debt, and rejecting the industrial opportunities of green leadership. He threw yet more taxpayers' cash at the carbon fat cats in the highly polluting steel, cement and other energy intensive industries, a sector that has perfected the dark art of special pleading.

The £1bn that was on offer to boost the nascent technology of capturing carbon pollution from power stations and burying it has now effectively disappeared, available only at some unspecified future date. Energy secretary Chris Huhne had guaranteed "absolutely no backsliding".

Osborne's infrastructure plan reads like a traffic report, namechecking new roads in every corner of the land. He performed a U-turn on possible expansion of Gatwick and Stansted airports, previously ruled out, and waved a starting flag for new airports elsewhere. In an astonishing and telling decision, he has postponed the application of air passenger duty to private jets.

Perhaps most shocking of all was Osborne's derision of the protection provided to the countryside as a "ridiculous cost" on business, though it chimed perfectly with the Treasury's war on planning. He must have missed environment secretary Caroline Spelman's speech at the Conservative party conference: "Going green is both a moral and economic imperative."

The rest of the much-vaunted infrastructure plan is in reality an insipid reheat of existing policies. There is no new investment to transform our ageing energy infrastructure into a secure, sustainable system fit for the 21st century, only the bailout for polluters. There is no new investment for flood defences, which this government has so scandalously slashed in the face of rising risk.

No new green measure merited mention in Osborne's speech, but then there was only one. The Green deal programme to refit the UK's draughty homes and cut energy bills got a welcome £200m to encourage homeowners to welcome the workmen in.

This exception that proves the rule reveals the opportunity being tragically abandoned by this government. Outside of the dark corridors of the Treasury, the green economy is seen as a shining growth opportunity, at home and for export. Already, the low-carbon and environmental sector employs 910,000 people, six times more than the heavy polluters, and policies like the Green deal and the reform of the energy market could create many more.

Yet Osborne chooses to incinerate the good work of his cabinet colleagues because of his ideological inability to accept green action as real growth. Ironically, he even accepted the damage caused to the economy by soaring fossil fuel prices, while damning measures to get the UK off the oil hook. With his incendiary words, Osborne has torched the flickering confidence that investors in the low-carbon economy were sheltering.

Ministers who truly get green, such as Greg Barker, may valiantly argue that it is action not words that counts. But that dictum does not apply to the man running the UK's £1.6 trillion economy.

Words matter. Osborne says burn, baby, burn. The only words that can douse these flames are from the prime minister. Speak now, David Cameron, or you will forever regret your silence.