If you were to ask people for a word to explain the collective errors that caused the economic crisis today, then it seems most would spit out the word made up of the five letters beginning with ‘G’, ending with a ‘D’, and which has an ‘R’ and two ‘Es’ in the middle. But it sometime seems to us that a slightly longer word would be more apt: madness. Surely only madness can explain how markets, governments, banks and the general public repeated the errors seen so often in the past.

But, here is another piece of madness for you.

You may have heard, there is this thing called a credit crunch, and to deal with it governments everywhere, and in particular in London, have come up with this idea of spending.

Spend, spend, spend. This is the mantra of today’s world. Before the credit crunch it was us, you and me, and the bloke next door. We spent too much, and saved too little. And now we have run out of puff, the government has taken on the baton.

And yet, while all around sparkling new money is being spent by the government, the one area where such spending can be justified is being starved of the cash it needs.

It beggars belief . But it is true, nonetheless.

When there is underutilized capacity and businesses are not spending, then government spending can make sense if the money being spent is used for future gain. If we blow a few billion on a VAT cut, so what. That’s money down the drain faster than you can say effluence.

If we blow money on bailing out banks, well at least we have stopped the financial system from caving in, but even so it amounts to little more than a patch on the sewage system that is our banks.

But if, instead, we spend the money on building a new infrastructure that will save the UK billions in the future, and help improve the UK’s capacity at the time the baby boomers retire, then isn’t that a good thing?

That is why the news that the world’s biggest ever offshore wind farm project is on the ropes, is a scandal to rank in order of magnitude with the errors made at Lehman, Northern Rock and the rest put together.

The FT put it this way: “Eon UK, the British arm of the German energy group, said the viability of its London Array project, a planned 1,000MW wind farm in the Thames estuary, had been called into question by the falling prices of oil, gas and carbon dioxide emissions permits.”

Those who criticise the government’s spending say we are building up inflationary forces. That our kids will be burdened with a massive tax bill, which will take a generation to pay. And, by the way, this tax bill will need paying just as the baby boomers retire, and the ratio of people retired to those working hits an all-time high.

Well, if you are sufficiently focused on the longer-term to worry about that future tax bill, then presumably you also know that the underlying problem of peak oil has not gone away. Once the economic recovery gets going again, and hundreds of millions of former peasants join the developed world, we will once again find oil is short in supply, and price is up among the clouds.

For that matter, the issue of climate change has not gone away, either.

Some argue that wind power is expensive and unreliable. But that misses the point. The more we do, the better we get at doing it. The cost of wind power will fall, as we become more practised in how to harness Zephyrus himself.

And while wind power is unreliable, we can, through the application of technology, ensure energy generated from the wind is used to power appliances that do not require a steady flow of energy. So, things that require electricity in a more flexible way could draw their energy from the wind. Storage heaters that heat up using electricity, then store the heat, releasing it gradually, are one example. Another might be air conditioning. If you go to bed and leave your mobile phone battery on charge, then all you really care about is that it is charged up when you wake up. You don’t care if it charges in intermittent bursts throughout the night. The big one, though, is the electric car. If you leave your car in your garage overnight, charging, it doesn’t matter when it is charged, as long as it is charged.

In his speech last week, Barack Obama talked about harnessing the power of the sun and the wind. It is a shame that we can not see similar visions in the UK government’s energy policy.

The thing about wind is that the cost of supplying wind power is all upfront. The cost of building the turbines, and, in the case of offshore wind farms, erecting them in the sea, is what costs the money. The payback is gradual and takes years.

So, if the government is going to boost the economy via spending, as Keynes said it should, then it is hard, very hard, to envisage a more ideal recipient of the government’s money than the wind industry. Jobs will be created and new skills that will be tradable abroad in the future will be developed. The UK is apparently the windiest country in Europe – if you like, our rotten weather is a potential asset. So, we can build on this asset, and develop new skills that create a new export sector. Above all, by following Keynes’ advice and investing now, we can provide a source of cheap energy for the future, when the baby boomers are retired.

So why even delay? Well, it just goes to show that the madness of short termism has not gone away.