There seems to have been an up tick in metaphysical subjects in the news as winter deepens. As the sun sinks lower in the sky, in some northerly places threatening to disappear entirely, a vague uneasiness spreads across the land. Animals scurry about making preparations for a siege, and people do something not all that different.

What do they fear? It seems to be more than just cold weather and diminished sunlight. People know that spring will come again in time, that the sun isn't really disappearing never to return, still there is depression that exceeds causes. Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD it is called by some, an explained in various ways amenable to symptomatic relief with light therapy and such. In God isn't big enough for some people Umberto Eco reaches into the idea bag to fish for older explanations.

Father Christmas means one thing to children: presents. He has no connection with the original St Nicholas, who performed a miracle in providing dowries for three poor sisters, thereby enabling them to marry and escape a life of prostitution.

Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.

They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms - yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious - to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest.

And we need to justify our lives to ourselves and to other people. Money is an instrument. It is not a value - but we need values as well as instruments, ends as well as means. The great problem faced by human beings is finding a way to accept the fact that each of us will die. . .

Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death. We in Europe have faced a fading of organised religion in recent years. Faith in the Christian churches has been declining.

The ideologies such as communism that promised to supplant religion have failed in spectacular and very public fashion. So we're all still looking for something that will reconcile each of us to the inevitability of our own death. . .

The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.

The death of the year, the sun's period of rest, has always and understandably prompted thoughts of personal extinction. It is no accident that father time, the grim reaper, is a black robed animated skeleton. And it does seem that Europeans have been floundering for some time, embracing one secret container after another as their traditional faiths become ever less tenable.

The symptoms aren't just odd eccentricities, positivist scientists attending evening seances. The tragedies of fascism and communism were also symptoms, and some have argued that the reactionary rejection of science and technology in Europe while embracing elements of the animist past are symptoms too. In another opinion piece, Winter comes to Mr Blair's la-la land and we're likely to be shivering for some time, Niall Ferguson explores some of the consequences of indulging such beliefs.

The problem for the British Government is simply that expensive gas was not something it bargained for when it formulated its energy policy back in 1997. This was to be an impeccably green policy. By 2010, Britain was to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions (principally CO2) to just 80 per cent of their 1990 levels - nearly double the cut required by the Kyoto treaty. Even today, Mr Blair still likes to pose as the greenest of world leaders, the man with a mission to salvage something from the wreck of Kyoto.

For a while this was almost convincing. The liberalised energy market he inherited from the Conservatives did his job for him as electricity generators shifted from coal to gas, attracted not so much by the lower carbon and particle emissions of burning gas, but by its wonderful cheapness. Back in 1987, gas accounted for just over 1 per cent of the fuel used to generate electricity in the United Kingdom. Today it accounts for 34 per cent. Recent forecasts suggested its share could rise to 60 per cent by 2020.

What ministers had overlooked was that, yes, prices can go up as well as down. . .

Until this year the Government has been living in la-la land, imagining that within five years a tenth of Britain's electricity requirements could come from "renewable" sources like wind power. This is pure fantasy. Wind farms simply cannot deliver enough energy, not least because the wind doesn't blow every day.

To meet its target, the Government would have to turn the whole of Wales, and probably Scotland, too, into a wind farm. . . Hmm. That just leaves coal and oil - both of which mean, er, increased CO2 emissions.

But never fear. Even as the lights and radiators go off all over Britain - which, ironically, The Sun thought would happen if an earlier Labour leader became Prime Minister - we will at least be able to console ourselves with the illusion of warmth. For, presciently anticipating the coming energy crisis, the Government last week allowed pubs, clubs and shops to sell alcohol 24 hours a day.

Of course, alcohol doesn't really warm you up - rather the reverse. But it feels as if it does, and for most people that's just as good.

That's worrisome. Perhaps Eco has a good point. Europeans, Brits in this case, are mentally unhinged about having lost their faith and are now ruinously prone to believing in occult fantasies and equally fantastic government energy policies. It's none of our concern so long as their fantasies are victimless crimes so to speak, like the seances of those dead positivists, but energy policies that result in increased emissions while promising reduced emissions affect us all. The UK isn't alone in this. As noted in Diminished Capacity Canada has also fallen into this habit, as have many other nations. Though this seems small beer in comparison to the consequences of those earlier fantasies - fascism and communism - greenism has yet to run its course and there are several scenarios where it is as bad or worse.

Worse, to my mind, the US always catches a mild form of the current Euro-disease. Fascism and communism infected the US to a sub-clinical extent while those diseases raged in Europe. It didn't bring collapse but it weakened society. Green infection also saps the strength of the US, clouding the social mind and making it far more difficult to formulate effective policies.

If Eco has it right, if the problem is that we are built to believe in occult fantasies that offer some explanation for death that comforts the living, and that only a few can maintain their sanity without such beliefs (and even then have their own sorts of imaginary comforts from their philosophies), then perhaps it is well that the US has a robust religious community and even has a believer at the helm. Perhaps the problems this causes for society are a fair price for the problems not caused by the lack?

Winter is coming. I'm glad it starts late and ends quickly here. It's been cold and wet for a couple of days and I'm already tired of it.