For all the time and money spent on climate change seminars, green-themed corporate graphics, and oil company adverts with loving depictions of windmills and meadows, few seem to have taken notice of a US Court of Appeals’ July 11 drive-by slaughter of the Clean Air Interstate Rule. CAIR is, sorry, was, the Environmental Protection Agency’s cap-and-trade programme for electric utilities’ emission allowances for sulphurous and nitrous oxides.

The decision to bust a cap on cap-and-trade was issued without the usual warnings that precede the publication of a ruling. For once, utilities and environmentalists were united, if only by their shock at the court’s invalidation of what had become a significant market.