It is more than remarkable. Germany has also banned carbon capture and storage. That says to me that the people in the heavy industries of the German economy will not put up with differentially
high energy prices. Germany is about to build 23 unabated coal-fired power stations. We have heard about how the Opposition Front-Bench team apparently do not want us to build gas-fired power stations, but the amount of carbon coming out of coal-fired stations is huge.
Shale gas will probably not change the world. It has already happened in the US, which now has gas prices one quarter of ours, and it will use that to suck in the chemicals industry and the global chemicals capacity that we need in places such as Teesside and Stockton North. It might well be true that we will never get our gas prices down to the level in the US, but something has happened structurally in the world when an economy the size of the US has energy prices one quarter of what they are in Europe. We need to be cognisant of that and respond. PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated that the benefit to US heavy industries of differentially low energy prices is $12 billion a year. Our shale gas prices might not deliver that, but shale gas could have a big impact on our economy.
I would like Ministers to consider certain actions. The first relates to honesty. If we must decarbonise, let us say that there is a price to it. Let us not say that it is actually cheaper. It is true that renewables are a hedge against rising fossil fuel prices—I do not hear that argument being deployed often enough—but it is also true that, at least for the foreseeable future, they are more expensive. We need to win that argument and take it head on, otherwise we will lose it incrementally. That is very important. Secondly, we should take on the EU over the confusion between renewables targets and decarbonisation. We are trying to decarbonise, not get higher up on a graph of who has the most renewables. They are not the same thing.