Man-made climate change may prove a disaster. No, I do not mean climate change itself. My concern here is rather over the policy responses. For, as was predictable and predicted, recognition of the risks is generating a host of interventionist gimmickry, not least in the UK.

People I think of as my friends – pro-market liberals – are suspicious of what many of them consider the “man-made climate change hysteria”. They are surely right to note that it is a remarkably convenient banner for opponents of the market economy, be they egalitarians or deep-green environmentalists. This time, they fear, Malthusians and socialists may have a politically successful (albeit, in their view, scientifically false) argument in favour of a long-standing desire to throttle the life out of the free-enterprise economy.