Trading in carbon dioxide emissions is not going to work

Mr Huhne is the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and he has told the UK Energy Summit that we need a “high carbon price” to underpin investment in green technologies. This is the sort of nonsense that Ministers are loath to spout, because it implies that a high price for emissions is desirable and achievable by some kind of Government action.

In fact an emission trading has proved hopeless and hapless as a means of controlling emissions of carbon dioxide. It has been very profitable in Europe for the large multi national energy companies, which have managed to get several hundred million pounds of free carbon credits, which they can see, in order to kick start the trading. As far as I know no green energy company has been awarded such free money. If there is any free money left please, Mr Huhne, send it to my thermal solar company, Genersys, and I assure you that it will be invested in green technologies.

Emissions trading, rather as I predicted in earlier posts, has not proved the silver bullet to kill the beast of pollution and excessive anthropogenic emissions; it has just been another game in the business casino.

What would have kick-started the green energy revolution is not giving hundreds of millions to the polluting monopolistic energy companies, but simply investing that money in microgeneration programs.

The massive challenge of which Mr Huhne spoke is not to create a high price for carbon dioxide – a substance that has no use and therefore it is hard to see how any market can be created in it, but to start mandating renewable energy throughout the country, so that every home has one or two renewable energy systems, and distinguishing between dirty renewable systems (like biomass and heat pumps) and clean renewables, like wind and solar.