David Cameron: Bloody Idiot.

Jesu Christe, the boy wonder’s only been there a day or two and he’s already lost it.

That's why I'll be announcing today the formation of a Quality of Life policy group. Its remit will be to investigate all the issues I've listed above. Its chairman will be John Gummer, former environment secretary, and its deputy chairman will be Zac Goldsmith, editor of the Ecologist. We'll be discussing the group's agenda at a meeting with Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and other leading environmental groups later today.

Zac Goldsmith is a complete and total loon on matters environmental. He wouldn’t know a decent economic argument if you slapped him in the face with it. And here’s the big wake up call. This is all an economic argument. No, not in the stupid manner that most talk about it, growth versus the environment. That’s a distraction. Economics is the science of how scarce resources get allocated.  We agree that there are certain scarce resources, wildlife, water, fish, clean air and so on. We’re arguing about how these should be allocated. Thus it is all an economic debate. Having someone entirely illiterate in the subject determining policy is simply asinine.

There was a time when it was fashionable to imagine that these tensions could never be resolved. On one side, environmentalists wanted to return to some mythical age of near-medieval simplicities, persuading the nation to live like monks. On the other side, "free marketeers" dismissed all concerns about the environment and quality of life as sentimental, leftwing claptrap.

We've got beyond those caricatures. Environmentalists recognise the need to balance their concerns with the demands of wealth creation. Free marketeers recognise that wealth creation is not the be all and end all. But we can go further. We can find ways to increase - in a phrase - both the quantity of money and the quality of life.

That isn’t the argument at all you twit. "Free market environmentalists" are all in favour of exactly the same goals as those proclaimed by the other environmentalists. We don’t want to boil our grandchildren, drown Bangladesh or choke the last remaining gorillas with the intestines of dolphins we’ve clubbed with the last shattered remnants of coral reefs any more than friggin’ Greenpeace does.

We’re saying that markets are the method by which we stop such things happening. We have scarce resources to allocate. Markets are the best method we’ve come up with to do that. Thus we should be inventing, constructing (and no, none of us believe that markets simply exist. They all have to be constructed) markets which do so.

Why in hell doesn’t the Boy Wonder actually have someone who knows these things on his team? Why not Iain Murray? After all, they were at Oxford together weren’t they? Already know each other? Hell, I’ll come and scream at Sir Jams’ boy if you want.