Dr. John Curtis:

I will start off on the fracked gas. I am not sure if the Deputy said it but it is clearly a fossil gas and not a transition fuel in its own right. The idea of gas being a transition fuel is based on a comparison with using oil or coal, which have higher emissions. If one switches to gas, one is still using a fossil fuel but one is producing less emissions. In the longer term, as my colleagues in the Department said, one builds biogas infrastructure and produce biomethane through taking agricultural and food waste, digesting that to produce biogas and upgrading it to the equivalent of natural gas. Then one has a net zero-emission fuel.

The Deputy's opening point was that the carbon tax allows one to pay to pollute.