The poll found a gaping “green divide” between what people say they do to save energy, and what really happens in Britain today. So 65 per cent claim only ever to buy those dim energy-saving lightbulbs — yet these account for less than 20 per cent of bulbs sold; 76 per cent say they recycle everything possible, yet only 22 per cent of British household waste is recycled. It was a similar story with everything from flying to leaving the TV on standby.

Here we have a set of pious beliefs observed more in the breach than the observance. Remind you of anything? As with other religions, in between the sermons and prayers, believers have to get on with real life; even many Catholics use birth control these days. Thus do people feel obliged to repeat the green catechism, yet still eschew the bus and grab cheap flights. They consume, but weighed down with guilt as well as shopping bags, and a feeling that they should atone perhaps by paying extra to plant a tree.

The eco-religion has as many rituals as the old faiths, only more fashionably look-at-me. Not for the green faithful the privacy of the confessional box or the pew; we are supposed to show off our piety in the recycling box or the organic produce aisle.

What’s more, it is a state religion, backed by all parties in our eco-theocracy, soon to be able to charge a modern tithe through new green taxes. No wonder leaders of the old C of E are attracted to the new one, where calling on us to repent in the name of global warming gives them a rare moral authority. Thus the Archbishop of Canterbury has cautioned that “millions, billions” will die from climate change and a bishop told last weekend’s demo on climate change that global warming is caused by humanity playing God. For that he got a cheer from the secular zealots of the new crusade.

Unlike the old faiths, the new pseudoreligion does not even offer us the prospect of salvation in the next life. Just a miserable existence in this one, while we wait for the four horse-persons of the eco-apocalypse — pestilence, war, famine and death by boredom.

• NO DOUBT 34-year-old Dhiren Barot, jailed for 40 years this week, is indeed “the most significant al-Qaeda terrorist captured in Britain”. But after the court reports of his half-cocked conspiracies and mad plots stored in Sainsbury bags, he still seemed like a pathetic overgrown adolescent loser to me.

  “Imagine the chaos”, he wrote, “if a powerful explosion were to rip through (an Underground tunnel) and actually rupture the river itself.” Yeah, right. One can imagine him hunched over his computer rupturing something with excitement over wet dreams of imaginary “dirty bombs”, swapping dirty conspiratorial emails with his mates via addresses including nightwithkylie@yahoo.co.uk, which were, said the prosecution, “written in the style of teenagers . . . employing sexual references which would not normally be considered appropriate to devout Muslims”.

  Even when these self-styled homegrown al-Qaeda terrorists are serious about wanting to kill thousands, they still end up looking like fantasist tossers.

• SO FAREWELL then, Donald Rumsfeld, not sentenced to be hanged like Saddam but just hung out to dry. The familiar mad Rummyisms reprinted everywhere ignored my favourite — his little-known defence of pre-emptive action from 2002, before the Iraq war, hypothesising about an attack on . . . the Moon.

  “And of course,” Mr Rumsfeld said, “the advantage of not acting against the Moon would be that no one could say that you acted. They would say, ‘Isn’t that good? You didn’t do anything against the Moon.’ The other side of the coin of not acting against the Moon in the event that the Moon posed a serious threat would be that you then suffered a serious loss and you’re sorry after that’ s over.”

  If President Bush had only stuck to his original plan to overthrow the Man in the Moon rather than the one in Baghdad, maybe things might have turned out differently back on Planet Earth.

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