Of all the unexploded bombs that were the Tory policy groups, the Quality of Life commission had the most potential to blow up and splatter Tory faces with goo. Its report today will make at least one cheerily naive recommendation: the proposed tax on supermarket car parking is so brilliantly calculated to scare the nation’s shoppers, for negligible environmental benefit, that I first thought it was a spoof. But there is more than enough substance in the rest of the report to achieve, I think, a real shift in the political landscape.

The last 18 months have seen an outstanding intellectual turnaround in a party that had previously been hobbled by its single-minded obsession with individualism. The belief that the free market was the only remedy for all ills – a strange mangling of Thatcherism – had left it completely unable to address many of the most important human questions, from social breakdown to climate change. The Conservative Party talked a lot about aspiration, but seemed unable to grasp that people do not only aspire to material wealth. David Cameron’s breakthrough was to understand that many of us also aspire to leave a better world behind us. He feels the same way himself.

Environmentalists were intially sceptical about whether Conservatives could ever marry their belief in markets with the need to reorientate our economy to live within planetary limits. This was, after all, the party of road-building. But Mr Cameron has gone a long way towards squaring that circle by applying the language of markets and choice to environmental concerns. In a speech on Monday at the London School of Economics he echoed Sir Nicholas Stern’s view that pollution is one of the greatest market failures. Pollution is not an engine of capitalism: it is a byproduct.

Putting a price on it will actually help to create new industries, and jobs. Mr Cameron has also repeated frequently in recent weeks that Conservative green taxes would be used to reduce other taxes elsewhere, notably on the family. Labour’s green taxes, such as air passenger duty, are widely seen as stealth taxes because they go straight into Treasury coffers. The resentment they have created is now directly endangering the Government’s other attempts to encourage greener behaviour.

The Tories have understood that lecturing and punishing people doesn’t work half as well as bribing them. Labour is making homeowners buy a Home Information Pack and an energy review, which will only improve a tiny minority of homes. The Tory commission would reward energy efficient houses with generous rebates on council tax or stamp duty.

Labour has refused to introduce feed-in tariffs, which would let people generate energy from the sun or wind and sell it back to the grid – one reason why Germany now generates twice as much electricity as Britain does from the sun. The Tory commission is proposing such tariffs. They want to make it easier and cheaper to be green. Their localist, decentralising agenda could help to build popular support for change.

This is substantive, serious stuff. But I doubt you will find many plaudits in the so-called “right-wing” press. This group is more likely to react with either derision or deafening silence – the two weapons with which they are currently determined to bring down the best hope they have of installing Conservative ideas in power.

No doubt some Tory MP, broadcasting from his hideout like a Paraguayan general, will blunder on to our screens tomorrow to ask why Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer didn’t say anything about immigration.

“Their report looks at waste, doesn’t it? So what about the waste of British workers? And what’s all this about reforming the Common Agricultural Policy? We want out of the bloody EU, we don’t want our party nancying around trying to get a better deal for African farmers. Oh, did I mention immigration yet?” It will be easy to mock ideas for measuring wellbeing as well as GDP.

But most of us know that economic growth alone cannot protect the countryside, our natural resources, our climate. That is not news to anyone except those who want Mr Cameron to fight old battles. A third of people told pollsters in May that they had personally experienced climate change. A staggering 80 per cent said in November that climate change policies would influence how they vote at the next election. That is not something that any party can ignore. Rightists who still see the environment as at best a distraction, and at worst a socialist conspiracy to undermine capitalism, are fatally mistaken.

No opposition party can be successful unless it rises to new challenges. Adapting our way of life to live within planetary limits is one of the greatest challenges of our age. The media lust after a showdown between the two Johns: Redwood – whose economic competitiveness report eulogised motorways – and Gummer, who recently claimed not to have read it.

But something more sophisticated is already happening. Green issues are being framed in more businesslike terms. That is the way to move forward.

Mr Cameron carries into this territory a sense of urgency and conviction, which the Government is sorely lacking. I looked today for Labour’s inspiring environmental manifesto of 1996. But it seems to have been purged from every archive, presumably to stop anyone comparing the brave ideals for which some of us voted then with the depressing reality, ten years on, that even government departments cannot reduce their carbon emissions.

Today’s report should put them on their mettle, and we should give Mr Cameron some credit.

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