With the much-hyped United Nations climate summit known as COP26 coming to Scotland at the beginning of November and energy prices leaping from one high to another, you might be forgiven for wondering, whatever your view of climate change, whether attempts to curb the production and use of fossil fuels might just have something to do with their prices rising so vertiginously of late.
Not at all, comes the retort from the more evangelical wing of the climate lobby, this latest crisis just shows we need to switch to cleaner energy sources more quickly.
Even Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, claimed that "clean energy transitions are a solution to the issues that we are seeing in gas and electricity markets today — not the cause of them.” Such views fail to hold up to scrutiny, as even a cursory look at the IEA’s own statistics would confirm.