92 months and counting.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

With motifs of climate-friendly transport woven into the fabric of the building, the Tricycle Cinema in north London was the ideal location to premiere Franny Armstrong's new film, The Age of Stupid . One story in the film concerns the conflict between a wind energy entrepreneur and his rather self-satisfied and uptight posh local opponents who dislike the idea of any change to the landscape. The posh people win.

Afterwards, in the cinema bar, a slightly intense woman came up to me and asked, "Why don't they make the wind turbines out of glass, then no one would be able to see them?"

Practicalities aside, her comment threw into relief the absurdity of a current impasse. We have a landscape that is already denuded and industrialised, flattened by monocultural farming and marked by pylons, motorways and mobile phone masts. But we are unwilling to restore to it the windmills that once proliferated, and could, today, help avert climate change and cleanly meet a significant share of our energy needs.

A few years ago, Allan Moore, chair of the British Wind Energy Association , pointed out that the opposition suffered by wind power was almost hysterically disproportionate and historically blind. He argued that in 17th-century Britain there were around 90,000 windmills. Now there were plans to build perhaps 4,000 bringing the total to 5,000.

Inverse proportions seem to be the order of the day. As the clock ticks down, it's the environment that could bail out the economy if only politicians could order their priorities sensibly. Everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the heir to the throne now understand this.

But, while the UK government were able to produce support to the financial sector equivalent to 20% of the nation's GDP, new and additional spending for green measures in the Treasury's pre-Budget report amounted to just 0.0083% of GDP.