The market is a hugely powerful tool. I’m all in favour of using it to solve our biggest problems. So I support tradeable pollution permits, like those for sulphur emissions introduced by George Bush Sr and described by Ben Macintyre in The Times this weekend.

As Macintyre says, the idea works. Which is why (in its own hopelessly bureaucratic and horse-trading way) the EU now has a trading system for industrial emissions of carbon.

So far so good. But I’m alarmed to see it reported that the UK government is seriously considering extending the carbon-trading principle to domestic households. Under this plan, each person would have to hand over a carbon ‘ration card’ – possibly the proposed new ID card – every time they filled up at the pumps, bought airline tickets, and so on. High users would have to purchase ration points from low users.

A kind of market, yes. But typical of those schemes beloved of zealots and government policy planners – superbly rational, but just plain daft. Impractical too: in a fluid society, with 26m people a year coming to the UK on short working visits, plus tourists, how are you going to get ration books out to everyone? And scary: the ink on the ID card bill is scarcely dry before zealots start dreaming up new ways of using it to make us live the way they want. What are they going to think of next? Rationing our calorie intake in order to combat obesity? Thanks, but I don’t really want to live in a society like that.