If you have plans about the kind of life you’d like to be living in 2030, think again. A cabal of world mayors called C40, chaired by Sadiq Khan, has already decided what sort of future you’ll have, and I can tell you now, it’s not looking like a barrel of laughs. Both Clover Moore and Sally Capp are enthusiastic members of this elite club of climate catastrophists, so there will be no escaping the lunacy here.

To put it bluntly, the mayors’ vision appears to indicate that they despise us ordinary folk.  What we have done to deserve this opprobrium remains a mystery.  Perhaps we are not woke enough. Perhaps we are not virtuous enough. We will never know.  Nothing else but disgust for the masses can explain the ‘measures’ they have set out in their report, ‘The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World’ written with Arup.

Each measure is accompanied by two targets they describe as either ‘ambitious’ or ‘progressive’. I would suggest that ‘bonkers’ is a more suitable adjective.

First off, you won’t be flying anywhere. They have suggested that the progressive target is one short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every two years, while the ambitious target is one short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every three years. This means that if you live in Australia, the furthest you’ll get is Australia.

But in good news, when your lucky day arrives after three years of waiting, and you go to pack your bag, you’ll be ready in a jiffy. This is because you’ll only have a few items of clothing to fit into your very small suitcase. Our overloads have magnanimously decreed that you’ll be allowed eight new pieces of clothing per year in the progressive scenario, or just three in the ambitious scenario.

Here’s another one. Forget drowning your sorrows with a chateaubriand followed by an exotic cheese platter.  In this brave new world, your ration will be the equivalent of two 650g rump steaks per month, and 90kg of diary per year.  Think that’s bad? The ambitious target is 0 kg of meat consumption per year and 0 kg dairy consumption per year. Hello malnutrition.

Oh, and forget having your own car. The progressive target is 190 vehicles per 1,000 people, while their ambitious vision for us is 0 private vehicles.  The report also proposes cutting down on the use of steel and cement in construction and increasing the proportion of buildings made from wood.

The dullness of the report’s title bellies the utter insanity which lies beneath. To describe what these luminaries envisage for us as ‘radical’ does not do it sufficient justice. Their aim is to return us to a pre-industrial age in which we are trapped in a dystopian world of fifteen-minute cities, subsisting on plant-based products in our unheated wooden houses, with nothing but a few recycled rags to hide our modesty. This truly is the road to serfdom.