Mark Daniels: The bonkers cost of global warming

I do, especially when I keep trying to find ways to save money and keep members of the Save The Penguin brigade happy at the same time.

I'll admit to sticking, somewhat doggedly and perhaps a little ignorantly, to the theory that the planet has been warming up for the best part of two and a half million years now so it seems a little egotistical to think that we alone have sentenced it to a future with no polar bears and boiling oceans after just a hundred and fifty odd years of industrial revolution, but I'll also grant that we could be doing things a little bit better - if only it all didn't cost so ruddy much.

With the price of living rising so fast you could be forgiven for thinking that we're actually being governed by the Zanu-PF party, but I have been trying to make cut-backs where I can. I no longer use my car for unnecessary journeys although, to be fair, this is less to do with saving the planet and more to do with the fact that it now costs more just to drive it out of my car park than it did to run my Mini Metro for a week when I was eighteen.

I make my children finish everything on their plate because Mr Brown has told me it's wasteful to leave it, even though the Coleman family apparently made their fortune from the mustard you left on the plate, rather than the bit you ate. And I do all my Tesco shopping, cash and carry ordering and all brewery related paraphernalia online, which results in eight trucks a week arriving at my pub instead of my once-a-week run to pick everything up.

I've bought a brand new commercial dishwasher to replace my aging, uneconomical unit in an attempt to save money and reduce energy consumption and I'm trialling some urinal blocks that apparently save me from having to use water.

I have so-called energy efficient light bulbs in most of my lamps now and give all my waste vegetable oil to a nice company who arrive each week in a van that smells like a chip shop to take it away and make bio-friendly fuels.

I recycle my plastic bottles, although bizarrely I'm not allowed to recycle my plastic lids, and I've got separate bins for glass, cans and cardboard.

And all I want to do is reduce my costs so I don't have to put my prices up. Again. I've even shopped around this week to try and save myself some money on my telecommunication services, and have come up trumps with a nice new landline contract and broadband service which has all but halved my current phone costs.

I can't try much harder to do my bit for the planet yet it still seems to be costing me more money than it used to, so you can imagine I was a bit aggrieved when a letter arrived on my doorstep reminding me that my current energy supply contract is coming to the end of its three year term and that I need to shop around for a new supplier and a new rate.

So shop around I have done. I've spent all day shopping around. I've called every energy supplier under the sun, and I've even approached the sun itself to see if it can supply me with a little bit of nuclear fusion free of charge. Solar power, they say, is the way forward - as long as you've got the necessary £5'000 for the odd panel or two to heat your water, and it's not raining.

The net result is this: my current supplier is offering me a new rate that works out to be a whopping 110% increase on my existing contract, which is a barmy amount. The cheapest (and by cheap I actually mean really expensive) rate that I've managed to negotiate still works out to be a butt-clenching 80% rise over my current utility costs. Even Robert Mugabe would wince at such percentages.

And that's without even going green. To go green, I was reliably informed, would cost me even more. Which seems, to little ol' humble me, to be a bit bonkers: surely, if we want to make people embrace the whole environmental issue, we shouldn't be pricing them out of it?

The planet, I'm afraid to say, will just have to continue getting hotter without my help.

It was going to anyway.