Here in the Derbyshire Peak District as I write it's about two degrees below freezing. A thick rind of frost covers the field above the house, where grass is sharp as ice and the earth an iron-hard crust. No birds sing. All is still, apparently lifeless.

But pick up a trenching spade. Four feet down there's another, warmer world. The soil is about 6C, not very different winter or summer, day or night: temperatures down there rise and dip only gently with the weather and the seasons.

My field — and our whole island — is a giant storage heater. And it's heating the house. Warm water courses through the radiators, and the bath and showers are piping hot. We have no gas here, no oil-fired boiler. The source of all this heat is the field outside.

Early this year I described my plans for ground-source energy. Radiators were being put in, floors were up. Diggers were churning the field and there were trenches, heaps of earth and rocks everywhere. Four hundred metres of thick black PVC pipe lay coiled by the drive like a monstrous snake, waiting for the trenches to house it, and 200 tonnes of sand had arrived to sheath the piping.

I explained — and will not repeat at length — the principle of ground-source heating, in which energy is harvested from tens of thousands of tonnes of earth, and transferred by a heat pump (the same technology as a refrigerator) into a few hundred litres of water. The latter is greatly warmed, the former very slightly cooled. Energy is not created, but moved and concentrated. That is the theory.

Well, the news is that it works. The system is simple to operate, reliable, responsive, quiet and efficient, the house is warm as toast, and the electricity bill (I used to have storage heaters) is plummeting. But the pump cost about £7,000 and the groundworks cost as much again. The planning bureaucracy was irksome and the mess horrendous. It was not strictly an economic decision. I did it out of interest, and because it's good to be a pioneer.

Yet the project has come quite close to making economic sense. Next (depending on the planners) I hope to invest in solar and wind energy. When both houses on our property are heated by ground source, we should have home-generated electricity left over to sell back into the national grid. The economics overall will then depend on the price that the electricity utility offers customers like me for our power.

In short, the practical and business case for my eco-energy project, and likewise for hundreds of thousands of citizens' green household dreams, depends at a number of key stages upon government. Overall:

1) Are there subsidies?

2) Is the planning system for or against us?

3) Do our national tariff structures for energy encourage or discourage private household investment?

Based on my experience so far, my answers are: 1) small and rather confusing subsidies do exist; 2) the planning system is against us; and 3) the price incentive for householders contemplating feeding the national grid is pitifully inadequate: a fraction of what is offered, say, to the swelling ranks of private generators in Germany.

Over to you, Gordon Brown, Hilary Benn and your fellow ministers. Government in Britain needs to learn to sing a new song. Interviewed from the Bali climate talks on the Today programme yesterday, Mr Benn was singing the old song.

It isn't governments that buy airline tickets, said the Environment Secretary: people do. He was being challenged by his interviewer, John Humphrys, to explain why the Government is allowing Heathrow (and, with it, air travel) to expand massively at a time when we are trying to curb global emissions. Mr Benn's implied argument was that government sets the carbon cap: if we insist on flying then that is our choice, but we may have to do a lot less of something else to pay for it.

But would he say what it was we might “choose” to do a lot less of? Getting an answer from him was like trying to get blood from a stone. Finally the minister was driven to whimpering about low-energy light bulbs. Mr Benn seemed doggedly reluctant to agree (as Mr Humphrys kept pressing him to) that in any important way we British might have to learn to live differently.

British ministers talk about climate change in the way many Christians talk about their faith. If they believed only half of what they profess, then the knowledge would surely have galvanised them, shaken them rigid; they would be grabbing us by our lapels and begging us, imploring us, commanding us, to repent.

My climate-change faith is flimsier. I don't believe in half the certainties of “the science” to which ministers subscribe — who knows how much of this climate change may be cyclical, how much irreversible, and how much is caused by us? Have scientists really (I doubt it) got the numbers, the levers, the timings right? — yet I am sure our planet is running out of fossil fuels and that there is a good chance that burning them is contributing to climate change. We don't need better arguments than these to conclude that we should find alternative sources of energy and new ways of saving energy; and, having found them, to make it worth people's while to switch.

I never thought I would write this, but Hilary should listen to his infuriating old dad, Tony. Tony Benn believes in the power — and the duty — of the State to change the way citizens live. On this issue, and from the other end of the ideological spectrum, I do too.

So dazzled by the Emerald City of market economics and personal choice have both the Centre Left and the Centre Right become that they seem to have forgotten that, even though the market may be as much a force of nature as the wind, a sailing ship still needs a navigator at the helm. Government is the navigator, and there are rocks ahead. Government must bribe or bully us into making different choices.

Planning disincentives should be cut and financial incentives increased. Only government can do this. Whopping new taxation is needed to encourage good husbandry in energy. Only government can do this. In particular, the case for road pricing is now overwhelming. Only government can do this. Yet everything I know about Gordon Brown tells me he will shortly shy at the road-pricing fence; and everything I know about the Tories tells me that they're unlikely to whip him on.

Which is a shame, because I believe the British people are ready to be shown a lead, ready to alter our own behaviour so long as others are made to pull their weight too. What we are not disposed to do is make gloriously quixotic personal sacrifices all on our own. If the Government could find the guts to require change, and apply those requirements to all of us, millions of my fellow citizens would react not with anger but relief. Ask your father, Hilary: the people need instruction.

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