Britain’s plan to tax carbon dioxide from power stations on top of European emissions costs may harm industry and raise energy bills without helping the environment, according to a panel of lawmakers. “A revenue-raising exercise disguised as a green policy won’t help anybody,” Tim Yeo, chairman of the U.K.’s energy and climate change committee, said in an e-mailed statement. “Instead of going it alone, the Chancellor would be better off working with other European governments to make the EU Emissions Trading System more effective.”The committee, a cross-party panel of lawmakers that published a report today after a four-month inquiry into government emissions policy, said the tax risked making U.K. energy prices higher than the rest of Europe. That may boost the nation’s power imports via cables linking it to France and the Netherlands, which do not have the additional costs. “It seems that politico-economic uncertainties are back on the agenda for U.K. generators,” Chris Rogers, a utilities analyst at Bloomberg Industries in London, said by e-mail. Britain’s energy prices have been among the lowest in Europe for at least the last four years, according to the most recent Eurostat figures compiled by Bloomberg. The country gets about 80 percent of its electricity from a mixture of coal and natural gas, so global fuel costs influence prices. The U.K. government said November it will help energy intensive industries with higher costs as a result of the tax.
