“Energy bills are set to rise again due to a spike in global gas markets,” Ed Miliband claimed this week. This rise, he claimed, means that the price cap administered by energy retail market regulator Ofgem will also rise this April. This will be the third price cap increase since the General Election, in which Miliband campaigned on a ticket of ‘lower bills’. “This will put up energy bills because of our reliance on global fossil fuel markets controlled by petrostates and dictators,” claimed the Secretary of State for Rising Energy Prices and Outright Falsehoods. There is trouble ahead, but rather than admit its causes and face up to them, Miliband merely gaslights the public.

There are many problems with Miliband’s claim. The first is that there is no “global” gas market – a fact that one might expect the most senior Minister with an energy brief to understand. This fact is easily demonstrated by a comparison or natural gas prices on different markets. At the time of writing, according to the Trading Economics platform, gas was selling for £0.117 per therm in Britain and $4 per MMMbtu in the USA – translated, this means gas is 4p per kWh in the UK and 1p per kWh in the USA. If there was a “global market” for the energy commodity, these prices would be much closer – within the order of a few per cent, as with oil, not one many times larger than the other. There is no more a “global market” for gas than there is a global market for haircuts.

Read More: Energy Prices Go Up, Miliband Doubles Down

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