Daily Mail
"The second Liberal issue to be given a major boost yesterday was the environment.
First, Chris Huhne got his way as the Government pledged to introduce a carbon price floor from 2013. This obscure-sounding change will herald a profound and expensive shift in electricity generation in Britain. It involves taxing conventional – gas and coal – energy producers, pushing up their costs, and forcing them to raise the price they charge for electricity as a result. This then benefits renewable energy producers – and nuclear power – because they can get away with charging more for their more-expensive-to-generate electricity.
The result will be to push up the cost of electricity for all of us, at a time when it’s rising anyway because of world oil prices increases. This will be hard for ordinary households, with average bills up 6 per cent by 2016, and difficult for industry as well.
Yes, it raises money for the Treasury – £1.4billion a year by 2015 – but however green the Tories are these days, it’s unlikely they would have embraced it so enthusiastically outside the Coalition.
Nor is that the end of the cash for greenery. Another pet Liberal Democrat project, the Green Investment Bank, which is supposed to put funds into green projects, has already been given £1billion of Government cash, and is now to be handed another £2billion of our money to invest. We can be fairly certain that much of the money will be thrown away as civil servants hand out cash to dubious green causes without proper financial checks. After all, if these green investments are so brilliant, why aren’t they getting cash from conventional banks?"
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