I wonder when people last got widely and publicly ridiculed for not believing in God: probably not for several hundred years.

Nowadays, you'd get a slightly odd look for doing the opposite and expressly stating your faith. But, if you really want to know what it's like to be a 16th-century heretic, try saying you're a bit sceptical about man-made global warming.

Temperatures do seem to have gone up a little, even though environmentalists acknowledge that we might be in for a cool spell now. And we've certainly had our fair share of tsunamis, hurricanes and typhoons recently. Still, no one has convincingly proved that all this is definitely man's fault. Try saying that in polite circles and it's like saying you're partial to roasted babies.

Well, Kempthorne did it. Polar Bears are now listed under the Endangered Species Act as threatened. Is there any validity to this listing or is it just more political garbage being pushed onto us by the “we hate ourselves and our technically based society” tree huggers. Since the 1970s, while the earth was supposedly warming, the number of Polar Bears increased from about 5,000 to about 22,000. Anyone who knows anything about world history knows that the Little Climatic Optimum saw temperatures a few degrees warmer than we have today and that during the Climatic Optimum the temperature was about 10 degrees warmer and by golly, we still have Polar Bears.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, Polar Bears exist as 20 distinct population groups. Two populations, 16.4 percent of all bears, live in areas where the temperature is falling and their population is decreasing. Wasn’t cold supposed to be good for them? Two populations, 13.6 percent of all bears, live in areas where the temperature is increasing locally and the number of bears there is increasing. Ten populations, 45.4 percent of all bears, live in stable population groups. The status of 6 populations is unknown at present.

Get out your gas masks and tin hats. We are under attack from a noxious army of doom-troopers demanding that we treat climate change as a rerun of the Second World War. In the latest move to militarise everyday life, the Environmental Audit Committee of MPs has seriously proposed energy rationing, aka “personal carbon credits”.

What next? Little (green) Hitlers patrolling the streets yelling “Put that high-energy light out!”? Or a campaign to bring back rickets? Everybody from the Prince of Wales to liberal newspapers and former Labour ministers now compares climate change to the war. Baroness Young of Old Scone, head of the Environment Agency, says this is “World War Three”. If it's not breaking the Official Secrets Act, could somebody explain what on earth they are on about? The notion of a “war on carbon” makes even less sense than the glorious “wars” on terror/drugs/crime/whatever.

AS I watch the drama about gasoline and oil prices play out on the streets and in the news media, some images and memories come to mind.

There is Will Rogers, the great sage and comedian, who famously commented during the Great Depression that America would be the first nation to “go to the poorhouse in an automobile.” This doesn’t sound comprehensible now, because driving a car is so basic to American life. But in those days, it was still something of a luxury and a novelty to have a car, and to drive it to the poorhouse was a contradiction in terms.

There are also scenes from the great “Mad Max” movies. In one of them, Australia has been reduced to chaos amid a cruel shortage of oil and gasoline. Men will kill in an instant for a few drops of precious gasoline to power their motorcycles, and life as we know it has stopped because of a deficiency of that magnificent stuff.

What I cannot understand is why so many people cannot figure out where the blame ultimately belongs when it comes to the high price of oil these days.

Who has been talking about how horrid Americans are with regard to the consumption of energy?

Who has been advocating for years that Americans use mass transportation more?

Who has urged that polar bears be declared “threatened” in order to close off any exploration, discovery, and extraction of oil and natural gas from Alaska’s north and northwester coasts?

Who has lobbied against opening up even 1% of the immense Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge where a massive amount of oil is known to exist?