Our dependence on fossil fuels is costing us a fortune. The answer is to end their use by giving people an alternative – renewable energy.
Inews reports that Britain’s energy bills have been a Government cash cow for decades. Stealth taxes that pay for social and environmental programmes add 25 per cent to our electricity bills. There’s nothing wrong with the programmes, only how they’re funded. And we pay VAT on energy too.
It adds up to about £9bn tax on our energy bills every year – at £300 per household, this makes energy considerably harder to afford. It creates energy poverty. And it’s unique to energy.
An example is that as a nation we spend about £2bn a year supporting food production, but we don’t add that cost to food bills. And while food poverty is a bigger issue affecting millions more people than energy poverty, there is no price cap for food and no VAT either.
In normal times, these energy taxes are wrong: in an energy crisis they look untenable.
This last weekend 20 MPs wrote to Boris Johnson demanding that the Government cut taxes on fuel bills and arguing that we need new exploration of the North Sea and the return of fracking.
But this shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the energy market. We don’t set the price of fossil fuels, even when we make
them ourselves.
The North Sea provides 40 per cent of our gas, but still we’ve been paying nearly 10 times more for it than we need to. Creating £20bn of windfall profits, which we should tax.
The problem is not just that we rely on global markets for fossil fuels, but that they set the price for those fossil fuels, even when they come from our North Sea.
What we need is to end the use of fossil fuels by giving people an alternative – green energy.
Ecotricity was the first energy company to offer our customers green electricity. We started with one windmill in Gloucestershire and have carried on building new wind and solar parks around Britain.
Whenever a home or business switches to us for their electricity, they stop using fossil fuel to power their home and start using green energy.
Other energy companies have followed our lead, and today around 33 per cent of the energy used in the UK comes from green sources.
But there’s still a long way to go, and there are still fossil-fuel power stations across the country, coughing carbon dioxide into the air and increasing the effects of climate change.
We want to stop that by continuing to build wind and solar parks as we grow, as well as exploring different types of renewable energy.
The only way we can do that is to keep investing in it and the only forward is to become energy-independent and price-independent – we can make all of the energy we need from the wind, sun and sea.
We have an abundance of these – and with the right regulation we can have price stability with green energy, as well as climate stability.
(Story source: Inews)
