We should do more for ourselves

With reference to the debate between Graham Hawkes’ letter on how the UK should make use of our own gas reserves under the ground to preserve our independence of supply to help keep costs down, versus Dan Mitchell’s view that green technology will bring reducedcost electricity to power our electric future.

I will ask the question: why is electricity the most expensive energy now? Apparently, it costs more per mile to run an electric car than a petrol car now, if charged at a charging station, because there’s 20 per cent VAT added, whereas, if charging at home, there’s only 5 per cent VAT. That’s quite a price disparity. As people switch over to electric vehicles, the government will not have the massive amount of tax income from fuel duty and it will be added on elsewhere.

There is also the issue of exporting “dirty work” while bragging that we are environmentally clean. If we import oil, gas and coal and our green technology depends on lithium and other rare earth materials, we’re really just swapping one source of pollution for another in someone else’s country.

Pollution can only be tackled globally and the way forward is not so simple. But I think we should do more for ourselves in this country, which would cut down on shipping goods around the world as well as cutting down on exploiting poorer countries and their people just to make goods such as mobile phones and vacuum cleaners cheaply to maximise profits.

Nigel Moore