To the Commons, then, for a bit of fantasy politics. Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, came to tell us how he is going to create green, coal-fired power stations. It is all very exciting. There are going to be four of them and they are going to capture carbon and keep it under the North Sea, forever, where it can't harm anyone but the mermaids.

It was like science fiction but for real. Who needs to see the new Star Trek when you can watch this? I half expected to see Captain Kirk, or at least Scotty, in the Chamber. Sadly not even Spock, who is a Tory, was there. I had to make do with the usual Klingons and John Gummer.

It seems appropriate that Ed Miliband is our secretary of state for science fiction. Both he and his brother, David, are talked of as future Labour leaders but I suspect Ed really IS the future. Indeed, if I had to bet which will come first - Ed as leader or coal as green as our valleys - I'd go for Ed.

The first thing to know about the future is that we have to talk in code. Everyone was warbling on about carbon capture and storage, also called CCS and carbon abatement (look, it's not my fault). One Labour MP told Ed he must be on top of the “transformation agenda” for the “new black gold”. Ed nodded and said he couldn't agree more.

Soon I came to realise that the “transformation agenda” is code for “have no idea if it's going to work but let's do it anyway”. What Ed did yesterday was lay down strict rules in which the fantasy is to take place. So there will be new coal-fired stations but only on the condition that they pretend that they will be able to capture all their carbon by 2025. They are going to do this through something called retro-fitting (which has nothing to do with vintage clothing or Lieutenant Uhura).

Every coal-fired power station built from now would have to commit to retrofitting the whole plant, 100 per cent, within five years of 2020, subject to the technology being ready, said Ed, whose words come out in a globular fashion, as round as all those molecules that he plans to imprison. The Lib Dems said that “subject to the technology being ready” was a “dirty great loophole”. Ed frowned. Such pessimism has no place in Star Trek Green Enterprise where there is no dirt, as everything, even politics, is clean.

Greg Clark, the Shadow Climate Change Secretary, is the Tory for Tunbridge Wells. As such, he has to be disgusted and yesterday he duly was. He said that, until now, our energy policy has been a “horror show”. (The Klingons grunted.) Greg said that Ed had copied his ideas and, just to prove how clever he is, he asked: “If four pilots are consented, each generating 300 megawatts of abated electricity, that will mean there will be 1.2 gigawatts of new capacity to be abated by 2020, how much unabated elecricity do you expect will be generated by 2020?”

Everyone pretended they knew the answer. Why not? It's their fantasy. Ed ended by saying that he wanted “to boldly go” where no minister had gone before. Or did I just imagine that?

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