The so-called 'climate crisis' has led to perhaps the most regressive wealth transfer in history. Never in the field of human commerce, or at least not since the fabled Sheriff of Nottingham, has so much tax been paid by people so poor to people so rich.

I sometimes wonder if Ed Miliband is hoping that by giving lots of money to the already wealthy, he can then impose extra taxes on them, in a sort of economic perpetual-motion machine.

The Energy Secretary has recently announced an increase in taxpayer subsidies for electric cars, electric heating and electricity bills. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, this week he quietly let slip that he will raise the amount he pays for new wind farms – in line with inflation – for an extra five years.

Under the complicated auction system in which the Government sets a fuel price for renewable energy (rather than allowing a market to function normally), Mr Miliband is now promising to pay up to an astonishing three(itals) times as much as the amount originally forecast: £113 per megawatt-hour for offshore wind instead of £38. Needless to say, this falls some way short of his pre-election promise to cut your bills by £300.

So where is this money going? As Guy Adams revealed in the Mail last week, hundreds of millions are being funnelled directly to wealthy landowners who rent their land to wind farm companies. They can trouser £150,000 per wind turbine per year – for 20 to 30 years. Yet still they want more: One, Christopher Moran, has been arguing in court that £10million a year for the wind farm on his land is not enough. And the companies that run the ‘farms’ make even more money.

As a landowner myself, I am acutely aware that my ecological and economic distaste for these eyesores has cost me dear.

The cost of paying all these huge subsidies is added to your electricity bills – which is why they are now the highest in the western world for both industrial and domestic power. And thanks to Miliband’s latest auction, they’re only going to rise.

Miliband argues that sluicing vast sums from the poor to the rich (not that he puts it that way) is necessary to reduce Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions and show ‘leadership’ in fighting the ‘climate crisis’.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has recently announced an increase in taxpayer subsidies for electric cars, electric heating and electricity bills

 All right, then: let’s do the sums. Britain currently produces 0.8per cent of the world’s emissions. Last year, gas supplied roughly 20 per cent of our energy and wind supplied some 25 per cent.

Let’s be generous and assume that windmills cut emissions by, say, 60 per cent over their lifetimes compared with gas turbines. (This is likely ambitious: once you take into account the necessary back-up power from gas when the wind does not blow, building and maintaining power lines to connect distant wind farms to cities, the coal consumed in making the turbines in China and the energy cost of maintaining them, it’s probably for less.)

As for solar, a reputable study has concluded that north of the Alps, solar panels probably supply little more energy over their lifetimes – if any – than went into their manufacture and operation. Solar generated only 5 per cent of Britain’s electricity last year, mostly when we least needed it, on bright summer afternoons. They are contributing next to nothing to emissions reduction.

Put all of this data together, and, by my calculations, Britain’s policy of subsidising rich landowners and rich companies to build and operate wind farms is achieving a reduction of two hundredths of one per cent (that’s 0.0002 per cent) of global emissions.

That is what £25billion a year of green energy subsidies is buying you – when your taxes are going up and up. And that’s if we don’t have to pay ‘climate reparations’, as the UN International Court of Justice has been demanding this week.

Sir Keir Starmer meets wind turbine technician apprentices at Orsted, an operations and maintenance facility in Grimsby, in 2022

At this pathetic rate, getting the world to net zero would cost £100trillion a year – or the entire world’s economic output.

The respected climate economist Bjorn Lomborg has calculated that if the whole of Europe went net-zero today and stayed net-zero for the rest of the century, this would reduce the rise in global temperature by 0.14°C – based on standard models.

Does that look like value for money?

Earlier this month Esther McVey asked Ed Miliband in the Commons, how much his vastly expensive policies would reduce global temperatures. He refused to answer. But what he did say was revealing: ‘The costs of inaction are much greater than the costs of action.’ Miliband is no longer claiming that he is saving taxpayers’ money by cutting emissions, just that his policy will cost less than climate change in the long run.

I highly doubt whether this is true. But let’s take him at his word and assume that his alleged ‘leadership’ will ensure that the whole world achieves global net zero in short order. What horrors will he have prevented?

Let’s take his own ‘State of the Climate’ report, which he presented in his best ominious tone to Parliament earlier this month. This warns merely that ‘recent decades have been warmer, wetter and sunnier than the 20th century,’ with earlier springs and more ‘lawn-cutting days’. Mostly good news – unless you hate lawn-mowing.

There has been more warming in winter than summer, so less frost and snow: good news given that death rates spike in cold weather much more than in hot weather.

The report adds that Britain now has 10 per cent more rain, most of it in winter – not that this seems to prevent hosepipe bans. The report can predict only ‘a slight increase’ in heavy rainfall, while finding a ‘downward trend’ in both average wind speed and maximum gust speed. Again, on balance, good news. The only bad news is that sea levels are rising, albeit very slowly – about a foot per century – but perhaps with a slight acceleration.

Where’s the horror, Ed? Project these changes to the end of the century, and take into account that crops and oak trees all grow faster these days because of carbon dioxide, and it is hard to call it a ‘crisis’.

Thirty nine studies by climate economists, summarised by Richard Tol of Sussex University, have meanwhile found on average that when we hit 1.5 degrees of warming, global GDP will be 0.74 per cent lower as a result; and 1.9 per cent lower if we hit three degrees of warming. That’s not 1.9 per cent lower than today: it’s 1.9 per cent lower than a much richer level reached in future.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects the average person in the world to be earning 4.5 times as much in 2100 as today if we carry on as we are. The model in which we forget about climate change and just let the fossil-fuel economy rip has the average person an astonishing 9.8 times richer in 2100 even with the effects of rapid climate change.

So Mr Miliband is asking you to reduce your standard of living today to save a bunch of very, very wealthy future people from being slightly less wealthy. And you’ll be enriching today’s super-wealthy landowners in the meantime. Yet another way in which he is transferring money from the poor to the rich in one of greatest boondoggles of all time. Was he Sheriff of Nottingham in a previous life?

• Viscount Ridley is a writer and businessman