When will there be a budget for the world?

I have just had to abandon listening to Alistair Darling's budget on the radio while I work, because to use popular parlance it was 'doing my head in'.

This is not a party political blogpost - but at this moment more than ever I have found myself thinking that our politicians are trying to gloss over the fact that they have absolutely no idea how to rescue the economy. By default I therefore assume that their 'expert advisors' have no idea either.

'Ecological budget'. 'Carbon budget'. These terms are gaining in use to refer to the idea that there are finite amounts of carbon that we can emit without pushing the planet's temperature over the edge; a finite extent to which we can ask the planet's ecosystems to support human activity; and the the idea that society could trade in these environmental commodities.

But surely there's a problem here. Are we not wrapping the environment up in the same language that our 'expert advisors' have developed to refer to the fiscal budget? And are we not witnessing a flagrant, panic-stricken plunge into greater and greater fiscal debt in order to try in vain to sustain an economic status quo? The idea that our decision-makers might adapt and adopt fiscal language for environmental capital, and then take on the same ideas of how to manage it. I can here the soundbites now...."This year we have decided to borrow from the planet 78% of the ecological capital we expect to have available in 15 years' time, so that we can sustain the rate of consumption our advisors suggest our voters quite fancy this year."

And the insanity and the fallacy of this argument will be lost among the political noise........