I can’t pretend I’m expecting to get on with Nigel Lawson. In fact, I’m worried that I might lose my cool – say something I’ll regret, perhaps even bop him on the nose.

On receiving his new book, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, I find myself handling it as though it is toxic; I even flinch at the expression of fierce intellectual arrogance in the author’s photograph.

When I start reading, though, I’m dismayed to discover that I agree with considerable amounts of what Lawson is saying – especially about the current biofuel madness – while also disagreeing with other chunks.

As energy minister under Margaret Thatcher, Lawson masterminded the war against the miners, and as chancellor of the exchequer he launched a series of controversial privatisations and deregulated financial services. Lately, he’s raised my blood pressure even further by pooh-poohing the idea of climate change and resisting any attempt to address what most people accept as a pressing reality. In fact, according to the Lawson view, I – like many others – am a deluded fool for growing food in the garden, cycling everywhere, flushing the minimum possible amount of water down the loo (using an Interflush), and generally making do and mending when things fall apart.

Still, it’s hard to disagree with him about biofuels, on which new European Union regulations came into effect last week, requiring petrol to contain at least 2.5% biofuel, a figure that will increase in future.

“Biofuels,” he says, “have become one of the European Union’s latest fads. It’s far from clear that ethanol produces more energy than is used in its own production. In the second place, it requires a vast amount of land to produce a relatively small amount of ethanol. This not only antagonises environmentalists, upset by the destruction of rainforests for this purpose, but has also led to a marked rise in food prices – in particular the price of grain.”

Last year the Chinese government suspended its production of ethanol for precisely this reason. Now dozens of other countries that are experiencing grave food shortages must wish more would do the same.

In person, Lawson appears less intimidating than his photo. Though no longer startlingly thin – his weight loss, some years ago, gave him the unexpected opportunity to become a bestselling diet guru – he’s by no means fat. And instead of scowling, he twinkles, disarmingly.

We meet at the glamorous home of his daughter, the TV cook Nigella, and her husband Charles Saatchi, the adman turned art collector. Lawson himself now lives in France. Sinister lifelike sculptures – an old codger, a woman pushing a pram – loiter in the hall and on the stairs. Among the many other artworks are several large pots by Grayson Perry.

To begin with, I tell Lawson I’m glad somebody of his background has made absolutely clear the uselessness of biofuels, carbon trading (“it has done nothing to reduce emissions, merely awarded subsidies to selected emitters”), and carbon offsetting (“a scam . . . it resembles nothing so much as the sale of indulgences by the medieval church”).

If we seriously wanted to reduce emissions, he says, we’d have to impose a carbon tax across the board – but this government lacks the confidence to do that. Not that he’s bothered about emissions, anyway. And so we come to climate change . . . or we would, but Lawson thinks the term is specious: it was only adopted, he says, because recent evidence suggests that global warming has almost stopped.

Well, his own party deserves much of the credit, or blame, I say, for pushing green issues up the agenda. The Tories have even swapped their old logo, a burning torch, for a green tree.

“David Cameron has gone overboard,” Lawson says. “I can understand some of the motivation. He was clearly engaging in rebranding the Conservative party because the old brand would not sell. But I suspect he may believe in it.”

True belief, he seems to imply, may be worse than cynical rebranding.

“I think [Cameron’s emphasis on green issues] is completely mistaken. I don’t think he has thought through the consequences.”

After serving on a House of Lords committee investigating the economics of global warming, Lawson himself concluded that the science behind it was not as certain as many people believe, and that the measures being taken to address the warming of the globe are economically damaging.

Then he wrote his book. “But despite being promoted by an outstanding literary agent,” he says, “the book was rejected by every British publisher to whom it was submitted – and there were a considerable number of them.” (It went to an American-owned publisher in the end.) The problem, Lawson believes, was that “to question global warming is regarded as sacrilege”. He gives a faint snort. “I hate intolerance. The only thing I won’t tolerate is intolerance.”

Taking this as a cue, I ask why his book overlooks the likelihood that oil may be approaching a terminal peak in supply. If, as most scientists believe, warming is caused by CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels, surely he should have tackled this important issue?

“People have been talking about ‘peak oil’ for as long as I can remember,” Lawson says, with a sniff. “It’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.”

Hang on a minute. The Hirsch report, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, concluded that we need to prepare for the likelihood of oil shortages at least two decades in advance. And President George Bush, challenged recently to ask the Saudis to pump more oil for the US, replied that they may not have the capacity to pump more. Lawson is unfazed. “They’ve got plenty,” he says.

End of argument. How can he possibly know this? Saudi oil reserves are not independently audited. But Lawson has a kind of lofty certitude in such matters.

Predictably, he is a big supporter of nuclear energy. Yet experts point out that if we try to match the world’s current energy requirements using nuclear power alone, we’ll run out of uranium in little more than a decade. Lawson ripostes, perhaps rightly, that uranium prospecting has never been carried out properly, so there’s probably much more out there. Even so, nuclear energy is still only a relatively short-term solution, and fraught with political problems.

I move on – to the future of the human race. In his book, Lawson states: “We care about our children and our grandchildren, but we do not normally lose sleep over the welfare of our grandchildren’s putative grandchildren.” Thus, it would be wrong to expect the present generation to make sacrifices for people who may or may not live hundreds or thousands of years hence.

But surely, Lord Lawson, if we aim for a way of living that is truly sustainable – if we leave the world as we find it – then not only our own children but every succeeding generation would benefit? And one way we might do this would be to switch to a monetary and economic system that doesn’t require constant growth.

“There’s nothing unsustainable about the way we do things now,” says Lawson. There is a pause.

I’m stumped. Every economist and businessman distinguishes between capital and income, I say. And by burning up fossil fuels, we’re spending nature’s capital, with no hope of replenishing it. To this Lawson has no answer.

For all his talk about bravely tackling orthodoxy, he remains wedded to a powerful orthodoxy of his own: mainstream economics. His arguments against tackling global warming come back again and again to the idea that globalisation, and economic growth, as measured by gross domestic product per head, are fundamentally necessary and even inevitable.

Yet people around the world are rioting as food becomes unaffordable. In part, this is because land has been sacrificed to growing biofuels, but it’s also down to the demands of global trade. Wouldn’t Kenyans, for example, be better off growing food for themselves, rather than mangetout for supermarkets?

He looks stern. “I know a lot about Kenya. The people of Kenya benefit from being able to sell their produce to markets in the West. Hugely.”

My time is nearly up. I argue that we will reduce emissions – and save valuable energy supplies – if we consume what we produce ourselves, instead of relying on international trade. Of course, this may result in a lower GDP, but is that necessarily so bad? I get nowhere, so I tell him a joke about two economists who challenge each other to eat a pile of dog excrement for £20,000 a go. Having both done this, and rendered themselves precisely no better off than before, they pat each other on the back. Why? Because they’ve increased GDP.

I’m rather pleased with this satirical critique. But Lawson doesn’t laugh.

“You are quite right that GDP is imperfect,” he says, his face assuming the all-powerful expression captured on his book jacket. “But it’s less imperfect than all the other things that have been tried. GDP per head, as a measure of prosperity, over the long run, goes up with consumption per head. And what people consume is generally what they want to consume. They don’t consume dog s***.”

An Appeal to Reason is published by Duckworth, £9.99

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