There are few farmers who would ever anticipate having electric tractors, diggers or combines in their lifetimes.

Electric cars’ share of the market is faltering. The share only exists due to being unwisely encouraged by governments interfering with the market. Production is driven by a real market, not an artificial one. The same is true of energy.

I am unable to differentiate as to the damage caused between oil and gas being extracted from beneath the ground or the oceans and the 100s of 1000s of acres of land being trashed to extract the lithium needed for the batteries to replace fossil fuels. All this is strongly supported by our Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – one Ed Miliband. I am astonished he is allowed such power by our rocky new government.

Then there are the miles and miles of giant pylons to carry intermittent electricity from the turbines that may never be built from the north and west of Scotland to a market hungry for power in the UK Midlands. No-one involved in this farce seems to comprehend that intermittent power production requires expensive standby backup to produce base load power. Combined cycle gas plants cost money when idle.

This is the big lie at the heart of wind and solar – the true costs are never revealed. The many subsidies and the costs of idle power plants (both gas and nuclear) are hidden from view by a complicit renewables industry and a lazy media.

The idiots throwing soup at van Gogh’s Sunflowers are not very different to wrecking Aberdeen’s economy by closing down the North Sea oil industry or allowing the UK’s last blast furnace at Port Talbot to shut due to skyrocketing electricity prices. They are all victims of a strange and monumental delusion. I have little doubt our climate is changing – slowly. Growing seasons are longer and crop yields and annual tree growth are improving – slowly. Annualised sea level rises are measurable – at most 7-8 inches per century. Global temperatures are not measurable accurately, have never been and, even if they were, would be meaningless. Deaths from exceptional weather events are at their lowest levels since records have been kept since the late 19th century. As Darwin’s bulldog – Thomas Huxley – memorably said, ‘science commits suicide when it adopts a creed’.

Follow the science, the activists say. So how have we got here ?

As a farmer who has long practised environmentalism in a small way (planting hedges, small woodlands, creating ponds and leaving some areas unsprayed), I have great admiration for those of us who are moving towards regenerative agriculture. Mob grazing (daily movement of cattle), cover crops, minimum or no till, keeping soils from being bare for long periods, ambitious rotations. None of these efforts are rewarded, of course, by the strangely static version of agricultural policy renewal in Scotland. My larger farmer neighbours are so focused on the bottom line and turnover they rarely take an interest in a turn to greener farming. Why would they ? They are given little encouragement and farmgate prices mainly remain ridiculously low.

Yet the wheels are slowly coming off the net-zero lunacy. More and more people are slowly realising that rapidly increasing electricity prices are largely due to our absurd idea about showing the world how virtuous we are by becoming carbon free. The world is not interested. As the prospect of power cuts even reaches the fanatical ‘Milibrain’, what does he do? He plans to commission giant flywheels when the wind is still and there are no sunbeams. More lunacy.

Nine wind farms are proposed offshore at Peterhead. Several battery ‘farms’ are proposed just inland on good arable land, along with a 600-acre substation that requires 20,000 tons of cement. How can any of this be considered green ? It is surely time the green religion of climate alarmism ran out of energy. Yet the money to fund it continues to overwhelm normal financial criteria. It’s the money it can make that attracts Rockefeller, Gates, Bezos, Bloomberg etc. Us innocent consumers are the victims of this outrageous scam. Farmers can only look on bemused as the UK seems hell-bent on destroying its economy. Agriculture and food security seem to have no place in any of this. We need a serious energy policy in the same way we need a serious agricultural policy for the future.

Geordie Burnett Stuart is CEO of Crichie Farms in Aberdeenshire