To grasp the almost suicidal state of unreality our Government has been driven into by the obsession with global warming, it is necessary to put together the two sides to an overall picture - each vividly highlighted by events of recent days.  On one hand, there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by "Climategate 2.0", the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.  It is hard to know where to begin, after a week which opened with The Sunday Telegraph's exclusive on a blast of realism from the Duke of Edinburgh over the folly of our official infatuation with useless windmills. Then came an excoriatory report from the House of Lords on how we have so run down our expertise that it is doubtful whether we can hope to run a new generation of nuclear power stations. Next, there was a report from a leading Swiss bank finding that the EU's "emissions trading scheme" has wasted $287 billion (?186 billion) over six years - paid by all of us, to achieve nothing in terms of reducing "carbon emissions". There was also a front page story in another newspaper, warning that (as readers of this column have long been aware) within nine years we could all be paying nearly ?300 a year to subsidise solar panels and those same useless windmills.  Let's start, however, with a form of insanity which has so far made few headlines - a Government policy which, in the next few years, will inflate the cost of a new home in Britain by as much as 66 per cent.  THE SOaRING COST OF 'ZERO CaRBON'  LaST WEEK, David Cameron and Nick Clegg were lamenting that house-building is at its lowest level since the 1920s, just when we desperately need millions of new homes (not least to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of immigrants flooding into Britain each year, as a result of policies they both support). Neither mentioned, though, that a major obstacle to any improvement in the figures is their own Coalition's building regulations, already being phased in. These decree that, by 2016, all new homes must be "zero carbon" in terms of energy use and emissions. according to official estimates in the Code for Sustainable Homes, this will increase the cost of building a house by up to ?37,793.  In rural areas, where there is already a serious housing crisis, this will be made still worse by the Government's wish by 2013 to abolish the "Fuel Factor", a relaxation of the rules for new homes in places without access to the natural gas grid. New houses built in outlying areas will no longer be allowed to install oil- or gas-cylinder-fired heating, but will have to rely on wood-pellet boilers or "heat pumps". a paper submitted to the Government by Calor points out that a polluting wood-fired boiler costs ?11,000, while "air-source heat pumps" (?15,000) and "ground-source pumps" (?18,000) have both been shown to be seriously inefficient.  But the Government, with its "carbon" obsession, seems determined to ignore such practical matters, even though they will push the cost of new housing through the roof and make a nonsense of their stated wish for a dramatic increase in the provision of new homes.  OUR DISaPPEaRING NUCLEaR CaPaBILITY  IN HIS annual Energy Statement to Parliament last week, Chris Huhne announced, through gritted teeth, that he is still hoping to see a new fleet of nuclear power stations to plug Britain's fast-looming energy gap, as older power stations are closed down by age or EU anti-pollution laws. This coincided with a devastating report from the Lords Science and Technology Committee on nuclear research and development, dismally depicting how Britain, which led the world in this field 50 years ago, has allowed its pool of expertise to run down so far that we no longer have the know-how even to operate a new generation of nuclear plants.  The authors begin their report, damningly, by saying that they were "struck by the extraordinary discrepancy between the view, on the one hand, of some senior Government officials and the Secretary of State [Mr Huhne] and on the other, those of independent experts from academia, industry, nuclear agencies, the regulator and the Government's own advisers. a fundamental change in the Government's approach to nuclear R&D is needed now to address the complacency which permeates their vision of how the UK's energy needs will be met in the future."  The fact is that we would be wholly reliant on foreign-owned companies to build new nuclear power stations. Britain's last world-class nuclear company, Westinghouse, was sold by Gordon Brown to the Japanese in 2006, at a knock-down price of ?3.4 billion. So if new "carbonfree" nuclear reactors are built here, it will most likely be by a German consortium of RWE and E.On - using a design from Toshiba's Westinghouse. and as the Lords point out, thanks to government policy, we would not even be able to provide engineers to run them.  INSIDE THE CLIMaTE CaBaL  WHILE OUR Government remains trapped in its green dreamworld, similar horror stories pile up on every side, from that UBS report on the astronomically costly fiasco of the EU's carbon-trading scheme, to our own Government's "carbon floor price", in effect a tax on CO2 emissions rising yearly from 2013. This alone will eventually be enough to double the cost of our electricity, and drive a further swath of what