What was missed: the new huge cost of going green

Amid all the excitement over that bit of his budget Philip Hammond had to withdraw, little attention was paid to an update by the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) of its projected figures for what we shall all be paying over the next five years in “green” levies and taxes.

The cost of “environmental levies” will almost have doubled, to £13.5billion a year, of which the largest component, £11.8billion, will be the subsidies we pay to wind farms, solar farms and “biomass” (mainly burning wood pellets shipped over from the US). The five-year total for all these measures to move us towards a “low carbon” economy will thus be £57billion.

To this must be added the Renewable Heat Incentive, which gives owners of business premises and large houses a huge profit to keep their woodchip boilers running round the clock, even in summer, at a five-year cost to taxpayers of £4.9billion. Add in further the projected cost of Air Passenger Duty and the Climate Levy, which the OBR estimates at £29billion, and all this means that we will, by 2022, have shelled out a further £91billion, equating to £700 a year for every household in the land.

All this is supposedly to save us from that global warming which has been so much in evidence lately. But isn’t it funny how the BBC, so keen on “saving the planet”, should never tell us about any of this?