My all-time favourite story from the spot-on news satire website The Daily Mash was the one sending up Alistair Darling’s pitiful attempts to rescue the British economy. Among his brilliant schemes was a plan to breed unicorns and sell them to Chinese millionaires.

“The chancellor would invest public money in up to a dozen unicorn farms across the country churning out thousands of magical horses which would then be vacuum packed and shipped to the Far East.”

“Mr Darling believes that at £250,000 a unicorn the government could have paid back its £120bn of borrowing by the time Star Trek becomes reality.”

So it was with a tremendous sense of deja vu that I heard Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband talking on this morning’s Today programme about his radical and costly new measures to tackle “global warming”.

There are, of course, many things to loathe about Ed Miliband: his wonky, slightly sinister face like a giant egg with a hedgehog on top; the way he says “sure” all the time; his Estuarial inability to pronounce his final consonants; the fact that there’s not just him but his ruddy brother too; the annoying missing “l” in his surname; but definitely the worst is the drivel this grinning eco loon is allowed to spout, largely unchallenged, on “climate change.”

This morning he claimed that by 2015 the miseries of his strict new energy policy will be partly offset by the creation of 400,000 “green jobs”. Oh really? These would presumably be green jobs not unlike the ones in President Obama’s much-cited windpowered economic miracle Spain, would they? The ones that actually destroy 2.2 other jobs for every green job that is created?

Yes, this was the truly depressing conclusion of a study published earlier this year by Dr Gabriel Calzada, a Spanish economics professor at Madrid’s Juan Carlos University.

“The study calculated that, since 2000, Spain spent $774,000 to create each “green job”, including subsidies of more than $1.3 million per wind industry job. It found that creating those jobs resulted in the destruction of nearly 113,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every “green job” created. Principally, jobs were lost in the fields of metallurgy, non-metallic mining and food processing, beverage and tobacco.”

Needless to say his BBC interviewer – the normally sound, but clearly not in this case Ed Stourton – did not call Miliband on this empty claim. Nor did Stourton raise any objection when Miliband produced the still-more-outrageous whopper that the English landscape is in greater danger from climate change than it is from windfarms. (Do read the great Christopher Booker on this subject today)

No it isn’t, Ed. Why do you think, all over the British countryside, there are dozens of campaign groups desperately trying to stop these monstrosities being erected on our beautiful landscape? Why do you think Miliband is now changing the planning laws so that local objections can be more easily overruled? Because no one, except a few politicians and eco-nutters and slippery eco-investors actually wants windfarms ruining Britain. Together with bio-fuels they’re arguably the greatest man-made eco-disaster of the last twenty years.

What a relief it would be to think that when New Labour are finally booted out, and Ed Miliband gets his new job as a mannikin in the shop window of Debenhams, that we’ll finally get a regime talking some sense on climate change.

Sadly, this is not to be. Cameron’s Conservatives are every bit as determined to impose ruinous carbon emissions targets on our groaning economy as Brown’s Socialists. Consider Tory energy spokesman Greg Clark’s pathetic response yesterday to Miliband’s “UK Low Carbon Transition Plan”.

Did Clark talk about the nonsense of green jobs? Did he protest about the 30 per cent rise in our energy prices? Did he point out the economic unfeasibility of trying to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050? Did he talk about the imminent threat of brown-outs because of the energy gap caused by successive governments’ failure to duck the issue of nuclear power?

Er, no. He just said – like the joke Irishman giving directions who says “If you want to get there I wouldn’t start from here” – that “households would end up paying because of the Government’s failure to act soon enough.”