Scarcely a day goes by without a supposed expert advising us of the latest step we must take to save the world from a global warming apocalypse. But this week's proposal from Lord Stern of Brentford out-trumps them all.
A former civil service economist plucked from semi-obscurity by Tony Blair to become a guru on 'climate change', he now tells us the best way to stave off global warming is to give up eating meat.
This, he explains, is because one of the most damaging contributions to the greenhouse effect is the methane given off by all those cows and sheep when they pass wind.
Even by the Green lobby's standards of self-deceiving absurdity, this must be a front-runner for the most fatuous proposal so far. Yet Lord Stern, alas, is not the first anti-global warming zealot to issue such an absurd missive.
Last year, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the railway engineer who is head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a similar suggestion to a conference organised by Compassion in World Farming.