The Climate Change Committee’s suspiciously opaque report

The Climate Change Committee, a quango set up to advise the Government on its emissions targets, make a big claim in their report today. They have, they suggest, disproved the argument that climate policy is set to drive substantial increases in energy bills by 2020. They say that ‘policies to achieve a low-carbon economy will add a further £110 to bills in 2020, almost entirely due to support for investments in low-carbon power generation’, less than other estimates. And so the Guardian have used that as a pretext to let climate attack dog Bob Ward accuse the TaxPayers’ Alliance and Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation of an attempt to ‘confuse and misinform the public with blatantly inflated figures’. Is that what we’ve done?
 
No. The figures I often quote come from Citigroup analysis that warns of an ‘affordability crisis’ for energy policy.  Their latest research argued that having to invest around £200 billion to meet environmental targets would drive up electricity prices by over 50 per cent, and dual fuel bills by more than a third, adjusted for inflation — even with improvements in energy efficiency.