www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1022110/MAIL-COMMENT-Carbon-rationing-inconvenient-truth.html
Boost for skipper Terry but England still so predictable Well at least John Terry feels a bit better. It was hard to identify progress in any other area here at Wembley. But a goal gave Chelsea's skipper exactly the kind of therapy he needed after that horrific climax to last week's Champions League final.
I'm the same Mummy: Defiant Trisha on how she refuses to be a cancer victim After being diagnosed with cancer and dramatically changing her hairstyle, chat-show queen Trisha Goddard refuses to be be defeated.
Kim Cattrall gets caught up in a wardrobe malfunction at Sex And The City's New York premiere Kim's metallic figure-hugging Vivienne Westwood frock proved just a little too tight for comfort, with the star forced to ply clingy material away from her derrire.
Add to My Stories Add to My Stories Of all the myriad daft schemes dreamed up in recent years to address the problem of global warming, 'personal carbon trading' is surely among the daftest. This idea, recommended yesterday by an all-party committee of MPs, is that every adult in Britain should be given an annual carbon allowance and a 'carbon ration card', to use each time they buy petrol, oil, gas, electricity and flights. pump At the pump: Drivers would have to flash a carbon ration card every time they fill up Anyone who exceeded their allowance would have to pay to top up their 'carbon bank'; those with unused credits at the end of the year could sell them for cash. In a Utopian society, this might seem sensible - making each individual and family responsible for their own carbon footprint and giving them financial incentives to reduce emissions. At a time when people are already struggling financially, this attempt to saddle them with more pointless expense shows how detached some politicians have become. Forty-five million ration cards would have to be produced and a vast carbon database created, capable of processing 15billion pieces of information each year. A vast bureaucracy would be required to administer the scheme. Defra has estimated the start-up cost at up to 2billion, with a further 1-2 billion annual running cost. The elderly and the housebound would suffer because they need to heat their homes for most of the day, as would large families, who need washing machines, baths and showers more than most. Those in rural areas would suffer as they have no option but to travel by car as would people working unsocial hours, when public transport is non-existent. If global warning is the dire threat that many (though by no means all) scientists suggest, the long-term solution must surely be technological - nuclear power, carbon capture, harnessing the tides and other imaginative initiatives for creating cleaner energy worldwide. It is in these areas the Environmental Audit Committee should be focusing its time and resources - not on hare-brained schemes which cost a fortune and have little or no effect. Benefits of work In what he calls the 'street-corner benefit culture', Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Chris Grayling identifies one of the blights of our age. With six million Britons now living in a jobless household, many of them in their physical prime, Labour's New Deal for the young unemployed has been exposed as a monstrously expensive failure. If we are to stem the growth of an underclass who expect to live off the state indefinitely, drastic action is required. Mr Grayling's plan to send jobless young people for an intensive course of employment training and then up to a year of community work, in return for receiving their benefits, deserves serious consideration. He recognises that if people are not infused with the work ethic by the age of 21, they probably never will be. Following excellent research by Iain Duncan Smith on deprivation and social justice, the Tories are beginning to develop a genuine strategy to boost economic activity among the unskilled. If they are to win a general election, they must offer practical solutions to a range of social and economic problems. These welfare proposals, coming after eye-catching initiatives on inheritance tax, migration and giving more freedom to schools, suggest their policy platform is now finally under construction.
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