What the TaxPayers’ Alliance and Daily Mail don’t tell about their ‘green tax con’
- 15 Aug 2011, 18:00
- Guy Shrubsole
The Daily Mail has an article today
headlined
'The 'green tax con' that is costing
families £500 as finances are under strain'.
The £500 figure comes from a book from the TaxPayers' Alliance,
Let Them
Eat Carbon, due to be released on Thursday. So far the TPA have
put out only a press
release and the book's introduction. The book - and the Mail -
argues that families are paying £500 more than they should be
annually in green taxes.
As Carbon Brief has detailed before, this
is not the first time that the Daily Mail has attacked the costs of
green taxes. In June, the Mail
claimed in a series of articles that 'green measures' were
adding £200 to an average household energy bill. The £200 figure
was based
on unreferenced claims by climate skeptic lobbyists the Global
Warming Policy Foundation.
In July, the Mail said that by 2020, green measures would add
"up to £1,000 a year" to household energy bills. This figure came from a
report by Unicredit bank which is not publicly available, which
the authors would not discuss, and which contained no further
detail about how the figure was calculated.
So what lies behind the statement that the 'green tax con' is
costing families £500? This is how the TPA justify
it in their press release:
- "The Office for National Statistics has reported that
environmental taxes raised £41.4 billion in 2010
- After accounting for total road spending (£9.2 billion in
2010-11) and Air Passenger Duty (£2.1 billion), total domestic
green taxes net of road spending were £30.1 billion in 2010
- Greenhouse gas emissions were 582.4 Mt CO2-equivalent in 2010
according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The
social cost of those emissions, based on earlier Government
estimates of the social cost per tonne adjusted for inflation, was
£16.9 billion
- That implies that excess green taxes were levied of £13.2
billion, or over £500 for every family."
In other words, according to the TPA, total domestic green taxes
amount to £30.1 billion annually. The 'social cost of carbon' is a
price which the Government puts on carbon emissions in order to
account for the economic impacts of climate change. The TPA says
that 'based on earlier Government estimates' the social cost of
carbon was £16.9 billion. £30.1 minus £16.9 is £13.2 billion, which
is equivalent to £500 per family.
Note however the crucial line "based on earlier Government
estimates". This is where the TPA have used an old government
accounting methodology - in geek-speak, a method called the Social
Cost of Carbon. It was replaced in 2009 following
criticism from a wide range of economists as being an
inaccurate way of properly capturing the price of carbon. The new
method of carbon valuation (
available here on the DECC website) looks at the cost of
mitigating emissions rather than estimated damage costs. As the
DECC website
states:
"Carbon valuation for policy appraisal
no longer uses the Social Cost of Carbon."
Even using the old methodology, the TPA may have seriously
underestimated the range of estimated social costs of climate
change. The
Stern Review, for example, calculated that under
business-as-usual emissions scenarios, the social cost of carbon is
$85 per tonne of CO2 equivalent (or £73.60 in 2007 prices).
Applying this social cost to the UK's total current emissions, as
the TPA does, gives a figure of £42.9bn - more than they say was
collected in environmental taxes last year.
As the TPA's report has not yet been released, it is impossible
to comment further on it at this time. It looks as though it may
make some valid arguments - it's certainly true for example that
very little of what the Treasury collects in 'green taxes' every
year is spent on green energy projects or infrastructure: when we
pay fuel duty, for example, only a proportion of it goes to funding
electric cars or public transport. But its figures for so-called
the "green tax con" are questionable.