'Carbon price floor' a tax on the poor and elderly women

Sunday Telegraph April 3rd, Terry Wogan's World:-

"The budget has been done and dusted to death by people at whom it is aimed: accountants, financial advisers and media commentators. It has to be explained by them to the rest of us, couched, as it always is, in imprenetrable Exchequer-speak. A week or so on, most of the non-political population have forgotten it, and are getting on with their lives in the face of taxes, the price of petrol and the rest of the slings and arrows that assail us.

Every so often, though, analysts turn over a stone and find something nasty underneath that the rest of us weren't supposed to notice: 'the carbon price floor'. Never heard of it? As Christopher Booker says it's designed to penalise polluters, like coal-fired power stations, hereby making investment in nuclear power and the dreaded wind turbines more viable.READ MORE

The treasury predicts it will raise £3.2 billion in three years from 2013, passed on via higher electricity prices: "Single-parent households and pensioners are likely to be affected, as their electricity bills represent a higher proportion of their expenditure. This is likely to affect more women than men".

It's a carbon tax on the poor, and particularly elderly women. Did you really mean that George? "

  (emphasis by Ed.)