There was plenty to criticise in the spring statement, not least Rishi Sunak’s attempt to bamboozle us with a tax cut in 2024 – when of course we are about to be clobbered with a National Insurance rise and frozen tax thresholds next week. But in some quarters the greatest ire was reserved for the one bit of unambiguously good news: the five pence cut in fuel duty.

It is hardly a giveaway – it merely surrenders some of the extra revenue taken in VAT due to the soaring price of road fuel in recent weeks. But it does at least provide a little relief for people who need their cars to get to work, and for companies delivering goods to their customers. Not that the Guardian saw it that way of course, insisting this was a ‘regressive’ tax cut, on the basis that 40 per cent of the lowest income households do not own a car.

That is a strange inversion of reality, since fuel tax itself is regressive. True, larger petrol and diesel cars tend to use more fuel, but there is no personal allowance for fuel duty, and neither are there higher rates for the rich. Indeed, increasing numbers of wealthy drivers now own electric vehicles which pay no fuel duty, no road tax – and in many cases qualify for taxpayer handouts worth thousands. Fuel duty is becoming a tax paid only by those who can’t afford to go electric. You don’t get much more regressive than that.

By a similar reversal, some are describing the modest cut in fuel duty as a ‘subsidy’ – “Rishi Sunak announced state subsidies for drivers, tax rises for everyone else,” read one comment piece in the New Statesman. Er, not quite. Even after last week’s cut, tax still accounts for a whopping 48 per cent of the price of a litre of unleaded. The green lobby now defines a ‘subsidy’ as: any deficit in the level of taxation relative to what they think it ought to be.

The eco-Left is learning to love the energy crisis just as it loved covid. Just as the latter opened the way for greater state involvement in our daily lives, so the energy crisis – which predated the invasion of Ukraine but has been compounded by it – provides the ammunition to attack our fossil fuel use. The way to defeat Vladimir Putin, we are told, is to drive at 55 mph and turn down our thermostats by a degree. That’ll teach him.

But hairshirt policies won’t hurt Putin: merely give him the satisfaction of thinking he has inflicted economic pain on the West. Even if we were to turn down our thermostats to 15 Celsius, a large proportion of the gas flowing through Europe’s economic veins would still be Russian. The reason is that for years western Europe has pursued energy policies which put the achievement of net zero carbon emissions ahead of all else, geopolitics included. Oil and gas were seen as dying industries, hence why we were happy to run down our own fields and rely on imports for a few years before we reached that promised land of 100 per cent green energy.

But we are still a long, long way from achieving that. In 2020, renewables accounted for 13.6 per cent of total energy consumption in Britain, but most of that figure was made up of biofuel: the filthy practice of burning woodchips in power stations as well as waste-incineration. If you look at genuine, clean renewables like wind, solar and hydro power they only make up 30.7 per cent of the 13.6 per cent – i.e. they account for 4.2 per cent of total energy consumption.

So, no, we can’t blow a great big raspberry at Vladimir Putin by voluntarily choosing to shiver. Nor can we do so by hurriedly building a few more onshore wind turbines. The only way to wean ourselves off Russian oil and gas is to source our oil and gas elsewhere – preferably from beneath our own land and seas.

The Denial by Ross Clark is published by Lume Books