How much does green idiocy cost households?

David Miliband's unconvincing performance in front of Jeremy Paxman this week after his Green lecture did at least leave one agreeing with him that Green is the new Red.

Frank Field recounts how Labour MPs have had to abandon doctrine after doctrine to New Labour in the hope of being elected, but "all the party’s activists believed it remained committed to the poor". What it has come down to is that "the very essence of being a centre-left MP was rudely and brutally questioned by the 10p abolition".

This sounds pretty minimal for a political philosophy. In fact, of course, Labour remains in favour of a huge redistribution of income since that is the only way it could "abolish child poverty" on its own egalitarian definition. Blair and Brown knew that the swing vote they needed would never embrace this policy, which was why Blair pursued it by stealth.

Benn and Miliband both seem to crave some overarching creed they can subscribe to. For both of them it is in their genes. Benn's father is a famously loony left-winger, while pere Miliband was a Marxist academic.

For both of them Green is the new crusade. Miliband nailed the green flag to his political mast in his lecture, and in the past has called for the EU to re-invent itself as a champion of the environment (whatever that means). And Hilary Benn recently said:

The Government is committed to building a low-carbon economy, here and around the world. That means a complete change in the way we live and an economic transformation that will put Britain at the forefront of a technological revolution in the way we use and source our energy.

Maybe he would care to follow Miliband into the Newsnight studio so that Paxman can dissect this statement - perhaps sharing the session with Nigel Lawson, author of the astringently readable "An appeal to reason - a cool look at global warming", or Philip Stott, whose blog is an oasis of accessible sanity.

The Tories also show signs of reverting to traditional behaviour. Whereas Labour craved the enfolding arms of a Big Faith, Conservatives' aim was firstly to get and keep power, and secondly to manage change incrementally. In this sense their leader's lack of principles is an advantage, as we see the environment dropping down his political agenda. This will not be through any conversion to the truth that he misunderstood the science and the policy consequences, but simply because it's not playing well in polling data.

The latest commentator to pick up the environmentalists' incoherence is Bernard Ingham in the Yorkshire Post, brought to a wider audience by Philip Stott. What ails politicians who dance to the green tune, he asks. Have they lost their powers of reason?

I ask because their pre-occupation with combating something that may or may not exist – that is, man-made global warming – is responsible for part of the growing burden of costs with which every household is now saddled.

So, he asks, how much is this costing us? We don't know because government and Opposition don't want to strip out the costs to show us.

Let's forget the so-called climate change levy (CCL), which has as marginal an effect on domestic consumers' bills as it does on CO2 reduction. Instead, the real damage is done by Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) designed to encourage the development of wind, wave, tidal, solar and other "renewable" forms of electricity. These are as idiotically conceived as the CCL, since nuclear and large-scale hydro-electricity, which emit next to no greenhouse gases, are excluded from both.

ROCs latterly have provided a 100 per cent subsidy substantially to wind power – so far the only major renewable source of electricity – and earlier this year, the Business Department forecast they would cost £23bn by 2020, or, nearly £1,000 per household. And for that we would optimistically get only 14 per cent of our electricity – and then only when the wind was blowing.

Unfortunately, that figure was out of date when it was calculated because Tony Blair had signed up to a battily impractical EU requirement to produce 20 per cent of our energy – and not just electricity – by 2020 from renewables.

If we are to offset the massive use of oil and gas for transport and domestic heating with renewables, we shall, as things stand, have to generate up to 45 per cent of our power with wind. So that will treble the eventual cost to £3,000 per household – without providing a reliable power supply.

Ofgem, the energy regulator, says that eight per cent – or £80 – of the current average current gas and electricity bill can be attributed to environmental charges and this is only going to rise with the billions required to link remote and largely useless wind farms to the grid.

This is not to mention more generally the costs of the carbon trading and offsetting rackets, the Treasury's punitive tax revenue from petrol and diesel, Gordon Brown's new "green levy" doubling car tax revenue to £4bn while, on the Treasury's own admission, reducing carbon emissions by less than one per cent, and taxes on rubbish.

"Why", asks Ingham, "do we put up with this "green" extortion to so little purpose? That's the real mystery."

It's no mystery at all. It's because politicians chop the costs up into little pieces to make it hard for anyone to add them all up.

Last year the Taxpayers' Alliance (thank you to them for pointing me at their paper) calculated that

In 2005-06, the total burden of green taxes and charges – Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty (net of road spending), Climate Change Levy, Landfill Tax and the net cost of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – was £21.9 billion. (This figure excludes Air Passenger Duty as emissions from international aviation are not included in national CO2 emissions totals.)

That's over £800 for each household in Britain, before you consider the cost of regulations. Some costs, for instance, are concealed in energy bills.

And the burden will have gone up a lot since then.