Frogs, we are told, will not leap out of the water in which they are being cooked, just so long as the temperature is increased very gradually. British governments have long applied the same principle to public taxation, and especially fuel taxes.  Every now and then, however, sharp rises in the crude oil price belatedly alert the public to the fact that they are being cooked and they leap into action. Thus Britain's most popular daily paper, The Sun, has launched a campaign - Keep It Down - to make the chancellor, George Osborne, scrap the planned rise in fuel duty on april 1, which will add a further 3p to the cost of a litre at the pumps. It has also co-opted the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, who has become one of the 150,000 or so signatories to the paper's petition, despite having been part of the government that originally proposed this increase.  Rather than just point out that Balls is one of the architects of the monumental publicsector deficit that the latest fuel duty increment is designed to reduce by ?500m a year, the government briefs nervously that it is "actively considering" the "fair fuel stabiliser".  This is a wheeze that Osborne first mooted in opposition when oil prices reached their peak in 2008. The idea, as he then described it, is that at times of sudden and temporary swings in the oil price, the rate of fuel duty charged would fall if crude prices rose, and rise if the cost of crude slumped.  Politics is an inherently chancy business, but here is a prediction on which you could safely bet as much as the price of a gallon of diesel: the government will not - not now, not ever - introduce its frequently touted "fair fuel stabiliser".  I say this not just because the Office for Budget Responsibility told the chancellor that it was intellectually incoherent: "In practice, the distinction between what constitutes a 'temporary' and a 'permanent' oil price shock is highly subjective. It is extremely difficult to identify in real time whether movements in the oil price are temporary or are likely to persist beyond the near term."  No, the real problem is not so much intellectual as practical, as James Spencer, of the Fuel Trading Company, pointed out to me. "How often will the fair fuel stabiliser change? Every week? Every month? Every quarter?" he asked. "For it to be relevant and cover price spikes, it will need to be changed frequently, which only very sophisticated IT systems could cope with. I have experienced nothing in government that tells me that its IT systems are ready for such a programme. I can't see it being anything but an absolute disaster."  Then there is the peculiar politics of the coalition to consider. The Liberal Democrats never liked the whole idea of Osborne's fair fuel stabiliser, as it sounded to them like a plan to reduce the level of tax on fossil fuels below the maximum that could be wrung from a public who, they believe, should be discouraged by all means possible from burning the stuff.  Thus the one member of the government who seems positively elated by the recent surge in crude prices - the result of oil traders' concerns over events in the Middle East and north africa - is the Lib Dem climate change secretary, Chris Huhne. In a speech last Thursday, Huhne proclaimed that at a price of more than $100 a barrel of oil, it actually becomes cheaper to move from hydrocarbon-fuelled energy to such green alternatives as wind power.  This is, of course, spectacularly misleading.  Not only will the government continue to make us subsidise its ?100billion wind turbine programme on a monumental scale; even when the thing is up and going, it will probably not lead to the decommissioning of a single fossil-fuel power station (what do you think will provide the back-up when the wind isn't obligingly strong?).  as Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, recently pointed out: "Offshore wind is one of the most expensive short-term ways you can conceive of to reduce CO2 emissions. It's economic nonsense."  Helm argues that the most effective way of "de-carbonising" Britain's energy, at least in the short term, would be to switch from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas in power generation: "If you take out four to five gigawatts of coal and replace it with gas, the CO2 savings would be similar and it would only cost ?5 billion-?7 billion, compared with ?100 billion for offshore wind."  although Huhne seems strangely reluctant to admit it, there is a gas glut: prices have been falling spectacularly as new exploration and production techniques have unlocked vast untapped reserves and the link between oil and gas prices has been broken. Yet because natural gas cannot be described as " renewable", Huhne regards it as ideologically unsound.  On the other hand, Huhne is not opposed to the absurd EU programme of mandating the substitution of crop-based biofuels for petrol, although this almost certainly does not reduce our carbon emissions and does force up food prices.  america is even more insanely committed to biofuels: more than 40% of its corn belt is now being burnt in its cars - involving tax credits to producers of about $8 billion (?5 billion) a year. The former vice-president al Gore last year admitted that he had originally promoted these enormous subsidies for reasons that were not entirely to do with saving the planet: "I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."  It is President Barack Obama who now confronts the anger of an american public shocked by the prospect of paying $4 (?2.50) a gallon for its petrol after the