Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" Two events last week again highlighted how ludicrously Britain’s energy policy is going off the rails. The first was a shock vote in the European Parliament, carried by Tory MEPs in defiance of David Cameron’s orders, further exposing a massive miscalculation by George Osborne that puts British industry at a huge disadvantage against its European competitors and will eventually double the bill we all pay for electricity.
On Tuesday, by just 19 votes, MEPs threw out a European Commission bid to save the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), the world’s largest “carbon market”, which since 2005 has forced electricity users to pay hundreds of billions of pounds for the carbon dioxide they emit. When, back in 2010, Mr Osborne announced that, on top of this, Britain’s electricity companies would, from this month, have to pay an additional “carbon tax”, increasing the cost of emissions to a “floor price” of £16 a ton, rising to £70 by 2030, he assumed that the ETS price would also be racing upwards. So the additional cost of his “carbon tax” would not be very great.
Since then, however, the ETS market has collapsed. Last Tuesday’s vote, just after Mr Osborne’s tax had come into force, sent the price per ton plummeting to a record low of just £2.25, meaning that Britain’s electricity users must now pay far more for “carbon emissions” than anyone else in Europe. And this is a gap due to widen rapidly, to nearly £30 by 2020 and £70 thereafter. On the basis of the CO2 emitted by Britain’s coal- and gas-fired power stations, this alone will eventually almost double our electricity bills. ....."
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