The party believes the proposal would raise more revenue than the existing climate change levy.

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Instead, the government exempted some energy-intensive firms from the Climate Change Levy - a measure designed to force industries to use energy more frugally.

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It says it has been driven to this because its lobbying for relief from business rates and the climate change levy has achieved nothing.

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But the other paras tell us that there is Petroleum Revenue Tax, some horrible Brownian complexity over the taxation of the extraction companies, fuel duty and excise taxes on petrol and derv plus VAT, and then the Climate Change Levy.

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Some of the issues that need to be addressed, he says, are the lack of any tax on aviation fuel, fiscal incentives for alternative-fuel vehicles, and the need for a carbon tax to replace the government's ill-directed climate-change levy.

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Many of his announcements were reheated (such as bringing aviation into Europe's emissions-trading scheme), modest (the climate-change levy, an industrial tax, will rise with inflation) or so speculative as to be irrelevant (a suggestion that the target for carbon cuts might be raised to 80% by 2050 from 60%).

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