Until recently the popular belief was that all forms of fossil fuel were bad, and the only way to cut carbon emissions was to promote renewables such as wind, solar and geothermal.
Oil, gas and coal were consigned to the political equivalent of the sin bin while billions of dollars were tossed in the direction of green-power promoters.
No prize for guessing that most of the money, harvested painfully from gullible taxpayers, has been wasted because like all neo-religions the green power movement is long on faith and short on fact.
Germany is the classic example of how it has gone horribly, albeit predictably, wrong. The country is mothballing its entire fleet of nuclear power stations and turning against oil and gas in the belief the wind blowing across the North Sea will provide enough power to run one of the world's biggest industrial economies.
Unfortunately for the Germans not even their technical expertise has found a way to make the wind blow hard enough, or often enough, to drive the massive wind farms being constructed off the country's northwest coast. As a result power prices are soaring as shortages develop and desperate measures are being taken, such as firing up the most polluting of all power stations, those burning brown coal.
Rather than lower its carbon emissions by going green the Germans are lifting their carbon emissions in a simply wonderful example of how the best laid plans can go astray when you ignore the evidence in the name of a false belief.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic the US has emerged as something far more significant than the country with the world's fastest growing oil industry. It has achieved precisely what Germany and the rest of Europe are dreaming about, much lower carbon emissions.
Last week's Statistical Review of World Energy from BP contained a passing reference to the carbon emissions achievement of the US, though the importance of the feat was drowned by a focus on other facts.
In London, the Financial Times newspaper focused on the marginal decline in the global LNG trade. This was an interesting point but one even the FT noted was a statistical blip that had more to do with Europe's economic malaise caused in part, it must be said, by high energy prices.
In New York, the Bloomberg news services made the rising tide of US oil production the subject of its headline, while Reuters noted a decline in global gas reserves, caused largely by a statistical adjustment for Russia's gas reserves.
Of far more importance to the global energy debate, and the point which The Slug would love to see rammed down the collective throat of green-led governments everywhere is that the boom in US gas production (shale and conventional) has reduced that country's carbon emissions to its lowest level since 1994.
In other words, gas production has enabled the US to hit its environmental clean-up targets whereas the heavily-promoted renewable and alternative forms of energy favoured by governments in places such as Europe and Australia, has not.
Where, wonders The Slug, was the leadership of the oil and gas industry when that fact was published because if ever there was an opportunity for a free kick that was it.
Why, wonders The Slug, did someone from APPEA or one of the big oil and gas producers not point out that if the Australian government promoted gas production then Australia too could get back to its 1994 carbon emission levels.
And when, wonders The Slug, will government in Australia wake up to the fact that tossing billions of dollars into green dreams is an utterly ridiculous waste of money when it is abundantly clear a solution to lowering the country's carbon footprint is at hand.
Rather than waste taxpayer dollars on born-to-fail projects such as geothermal energy, wind that only works sometime but pollutes the countryside all the time, and solar, which only works when the sun shines, it can be argued that gas does it better.
For starters, just imagine what the $10 billion or so promised for green energy projects could do to the unleashing of the unconventional gas potential of the Cooper and other hydrocarbon basins. The government could use that money to invest in nationally important infrastructure such as pipelines while the explorers get on with the job of drilling.
One day, but only after the oil and gas industry speaks more forcefully, government might acknowledge that it has been barking up the wrong tree.
