Listing on London’s Aim market today is Plantic Technologies, an Australian company that has developed a low-cost fully biodegradable soft plastic based on corn starch. This is potentially wonderful news for the environment.

For a start, traditional plastics are manufactured from non-renewable resources, such as oil, coal and natural gas.

What’s more, they are a significant source of pollution. The stuff last decades. Some 95% of all plastic produced since the material was introduced in the 1930s is still in existence, much of it buried in landfill sites. Plastic bags have even been found littering relatively untouched Himalayan mountains.

Bioplastics have been available for some time. But they have not been widely used, because they cost between two-ten times as much. Conventional economics takes no account of such ‘externalities’ as disposal costs.

If Plantic’s products live up to the hype, a sane society would ensure that the use of bioplastics of this type are widely and rapidly generalised. But they won’t be. Plantic has a patent.

So on the one hand, an innovation developed under the free market offers the possibility of solving a major environmental headache. And on the other, free market mechanisms mean that this just won’t happen.

Brown is the new green. Or at least that’s what New Labour wants us to believe. The prime minister is set to deliver his first major speech on the environment today, with the spin doctors flagging up the likelihood of tougher domestic targets on carbon emissions and probably a doubling of renewable energy targets to boot.

Far be it from me to belittle targets per se. Before dramatic changes can be brought about in any aspect of public policy, it is as well to plan for them first. But targets are one thing and delivery is another. Our experience of target culture in education, education, education surely underlines that.

Electoral expediency has forced Brown’s rivals – both Labour rivals such as Tony Blair and Tory rivals such as David Cameron - to talk a good game on green issues. In truth, Blair delivered little.

On a Monday he tell us that climate change is the most important issue facing the planet, and then on a Tuesday, call for three new runways in the south of England so we can double air travel over the next two decades.

Then again, mainstream politicians have failed to tackle inequality or stand up to the power of the media, the corporations and the bankers. So can we trust them over the environment?

Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period in human history. This has generated massive gains in human wellbeing and economic development, of course.

But there have been considerable negative consequences, including a substantial and irreversible loss of biodiversity, and wide-ranging environmental degradation.

The global poor bear the worst effects. The environment is often a principal factor in poverty and social conflict. So yes, it is a class issue.

Just as it used to be argued that there is no such thing as socialism in one country, the actions of one country alone cannot save the environment.

Work must start now on a much tougher Kyoto II, ready when present agreement expires in 2012. This time it must include China and India. If Brown is even remotely serious, Britain will be pushing for a serious mechanism to cap carbon emissions globally, and one that works rather better than the joke EU carbon permits scheme.

Again, if he wants to convince us of his environmental credentials, let’s have some real evidence in today’s speech that Brown is willing to do the green thing, even if it that includes steps that will earn him a rough ride from tabloid leader writers.

Sadly, I’m not expecting a halt to all road-building, the introduction of year-by-year targets to reduce car usage by boosting public transport and limitations on environmentally deleterious cheap flights – just to pluck a few badly-needed steps at random - to figure among the announcements in today’s speech.

SCRATCH Jean Lambert, get Lavrentiy Beria; Green politicians are all totalitarians in the making, just itching to refound a carbon-neutral Gulag Archipelago.

This, anyway, is the position of Times hack Antonia Senior, who has obviously given the matter a great deal of thought. Her stark warning must be heeded at once by anyone sufficiently naïve to cast the odd tactical vote for the Green Party, in the misguided belief that they are a harmless functional equivalent for the old-style moderate social democracy unavailable elsewhere on the ballot paper.

Writing after publication this week of the memoirs of Anthony Blunt – the upper class art historian who spied for the Soviet Union – Ms Senior fearlessly unveils the obvious but somehow hitherto concealed parallels between environmentalism and what remains history’s most bloodstained creed.

If Blunt were young today, he would not be red; he would be green. His band of angry young men would find Gore where once they found Marx.

Yeah. Because the erstwhile veep is widely rated as a thinker of world-historic significance, whose writings are capable of an inexhaustible array of meanings that will still be in contention for centuries after his death.

If you squint, red and green look disarmingly similar.

If you squint, lots of things look disarmingly similar. In fact, inability to distinguish between red and green is one of the diagnostic criteria for colour blindness. Don’t worry, Antonia. Most opticians include tests for this kind of thing as part of an annual eye examination, at no extra cost.

Both identify an end utopia that is difficult to dispute. The diktat “from each according to his ability, to each according to his means” sounds lovely on paper. Greens promise a world in which we actually survive a coming ecological apocalypse. A desirable outcome, undoubtedly.

So the survival of the planet is actually ‘utopian’, is it? Look, I hate to sound controversial or anything. But as long-term goals go, that idea seems pretty pragmatic to me. Shit, I hope humanity doesn’t underachieve on this one.

But the means to these ends seem similarly insurmountable. Both routes demand an immediate suspension of human nature.

Funnily enough, Hackney Greens have just stuck a leaflet through my letterbox. Astonishingly, it concentrates on council plans to redevelop a small play area over the road. Not once does it so much as ask me to overcome my innate genetic predisposition to certain behavioural patterns. But, hey, let Antonia develop her theme:

Red-filtered, my desires are despicable and bourgeois and must be beaten out of me with indoctrination or force. Green-filtered, my small desires are despicable acts of ecological vandalism. My house is a carbon factory. My desire to travel, to own stuff, to eat meat, to procreate, to heat my house, to shower for a really, really long time; all are evil.

Steady on, Antonia, or people will begin to suspect you of conjuring up straw men here. It is a bit of a jump from George Monbiot’s arguments in favour of limitations on the number of flights that people take to the proposition that children are the work of Satan, isn’t it? Don’t you think you are exaggerating here? I mean, just slightly?

Professor Ian Pilmer, the Australian geologist and climate change sceptic, could not find a publisher for his book Heaven and Earth, which questions the orthodoxy about global warming. He is the subject of hate mail and demonstrations. It is entirely immaterial whether he is right or wrong. An environment that stifles his right to a voice is worse than one that is overheating.

If Prof Pilmer’s work is a commercial proposition, it will find a publisher readily enough. That’s how come Bjørn Lomborg is a minor celebrity. If it isn’t up to scratch… well, there are thousands of frustrated wannabe authors out there.

Fans of nuclear are the Trotskys of the movement, subject to batterings by verbal ice pick.

Sorry, love. You have completely lost me here. I, for one, am not against nuclear power on principle, although I doubt whether the economics will ever stack up, and the disposal of the resultant waste strikes me as an obvious difficulty.

My Green friends disagree with me on this point. But so far, not one of them has tried to force me to go into exile in Mexico, launch a doomed affair with that nutty artist chick, and run the risk of multiple assassination attempts.

From here on in, there are no limits to Antonia’s ability to spin out obviously ludicrous parallels with Russian history.

Zac Goldsmith and Prince Charles look like modern Narodniks, talking glib green from the safety of their gilded lives.

Right. The Tory ppc and the heir to the throne represent exact equivalents to Lenin’s famous ‘useful idiots’. That is why the cause of Lambert and Lucas is guaranteed ultimate success, by whatever means necessary:

Our intransigent refusal to choose green will be met by a new militancy from those who believe we must be saved from ourselves. Ultra-green states cannot arise without some form of forced switch to autocracy; the dictatorship of the environmentalists.

Given that the Greens, at least in this country, have yet to win a Westminster seat, my guess is that this scenario is probably some way away. But thanks for marking our cards, Antonia.