CHRIS HUHNE, the Energy Secretary, has announced steps to cut Britain’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by an incredible 60 per cent over the next 20 years.

There will be Government subsidies for a huge expansion in wind energy, solar panels and home insulation. The cost to the taxpayers will be enormous.

Ministers will also force up the price of coal, oil and gas, so our electricity bills will increase by £10 per week and energyintensive industries will migrate to countries with lower energy costs. Many jobs will be lost.

Our politicians believe that the increase in man-made carbon dioxide emissions since 1940 has caused the very small increase in the temperature of the atmosphere which has taken place since then.

But that increase started many years before 1940, and over the last 12 years there has been no temperature increase at all, even though world-wide C02 emissions have been rising rapidly.

More importantly, many scientists point out that changes in the Earth’s orbit and its axial rotation, along with variations in the sun’s energy output have been the main causes of climate change over the last 500,000 years.

But that is complicated – and our politicians don’t like complexity.

They prefer ‘‘CO2 emissions up, atmospheric temperatures up, therefore CO2 causes the increase’’ because it is easy to understand. So they want to spend huge sums of public money on expensive and unreliable wind turbines and solar panels.

Atmospheric physicists in America have proved that even if the Kyoto Protocol is observed there would be a temperature increase of one 20th of a degree by 2050, at the most. Too small to be detectable, but the politicians don’t want to know.

You couldn’t make it up.

Jim Allan, Hartlepool.