The plan is simple: rather than using natural gas as a sort of stop-gap while we gradually wean ourselves off coal, we can just go straight from burning the brown stuff to fuelling our homes, businesses and institutions with renewables like wind and solar, all within 12 years.

Natural gas, the Greens reminded us in that way of theirs, is a fossil fuel too, and burning it pumps dangerous carbon into the atmosphere.

OK, nearly everybody gets the carbon and coal thing these days, but this gas plan sounds, well, a little out there.

Up to 80 per cent of Victorian homes use gas, the highest proportion of any state or territory. We’d have to shell out for new stoves, heating and water systems, and we’d basically double our demand for electricity.

Who would pay for all those poles and wires? How would all that extra juice be generated?

Besides, we love cooking with gas.

The Greens’ plan is not only “silly”, one energy expert told The Age this week, but “populist” too.

So there.

Now, it’s nothing new for the Greens to have their ideas, policies and their very existence mocked, sassed and dissed. It kind of comes with the membership card.

But what’s silly in this day and age is not taking the Greens and their supporters seriously.

For one thing, there's quite a lot of them.

Nearly 385,000 Victorians gave the Greens their first preference vote in lower house contests in the 2014 election, more than twice as many as the Nationals managed.

Population growth alone should see the Greens easily crack the 400,000 mark when Victoria votes again in November. That is just too many votes for anybody to ignore

Premier Daniel Andrews and his Labor colleagues have got the memo.

His large-scale solar and wind generation schemes and plans for the government to pay for solar panels, batteries and hot water systems in hundreds of thousands of Victorian homes. His renewable power target of 40 per cent by 2025. These could all be plausibly passed off as Greens policies.

But it doesn’t stop at environmental or energy policy.

Two of Labor’s big ticket social reforms this term, voluntary assisted dying and the safe injecting room in Richmond, are both prime examples of the many Green dreams that came true in the end.

Yes, Labor did the heavy lifting to get the legislation onto the statute books having come, quite late in the piece, to support the safe room and VAD. Nor should the role played by Reason Party MP Fiona Patten be underplayed.

But it’s still hard to imagine either of those policies ever getting up if not for the long years of Greens’ lobbying, arguing, organising and yes, preaching in the face of plenty of people saying it would never happen.

Despite those long-term successes, the Greens have had a tough couple of years, both at federal and state level, navigating the awkward adolescence between protest outfit and fair dinkum party of power.

Various branches and state operations have been unprepared for bad people joining their ranks and engaging in ugly or even criminal behaviour, there is internal division and even hints of internalised trauma from all the years of being the party everybody loves to knock.

Then there are Greens who have decided that turning the other cheek is no longer the way to go and have tried to take play the political and media establishments at their own games, digging dirt on opponents, heavying journalists.

But those people are dead wrong. The Greens got to where they are today by being different and maintaining their good humour in the face of the often unfair attacks they cop.

There aren’t many votes in trying to be the third force in politics that behaves just like the first and second.

The Greens must also develop a working model for how to wield power when they win it.

The party has twice used balance-of-power status to help Labor form minority governments in Tasmania. Both experiments ended in tears.

Greens-supported Labor governments in the ACT since 2008 have been less traumatic than the Tassie experience, but have gone a lot better for Labor than for their partners.

Now Victorian Greens Leader Samantha Ratnam and her colleagues need a plan because there’s every chance they will end up as the balance of power when Victorian votes next month.

That plan might include demands for ministries as the price of support for a minority Andrews government – a common way to approach balance-of-power negotiations.

So let that prospect sink in, Greens ministers slapping their plan for a gas ban on the cabinet table before the year is out.

If the Greens suggested banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in Australia from 2030, they’d be laughed out of town, but that’s official policy already in several developed countries.

Likewise the gas ban looks a bit of a stretch today, but when Australia’s years of energy policy paralysis finally end, we’ll be about 10 years behind the leaders in emissions reduction and we might need to catch up quick. Everything might be on the table.

So you can dismiss the Greens dreamers, most of them won’t mind. But it pays to remember that Green dreams sometimes come true.

Noel Towell is state political editor.