Fidias says Cyprus has ‘failed its citizens’ over high energy prices

Cyprus’ government has “failed its citizens” on account of the island’s high and rising energy prices, Direct Democracy Cyprus leader Fidias Panayiotou said on Wednesday, as he addressed a European Parliament debate on the matter of energy. “The government of my country, Cyprus, has failed its citizens, and now we are paying one of the highest bills for electricity. For years, the Cypriot government has not managed to import natural gas, and it has failed to get enough batteries for renewable energy,” he told the Strasbourg plenary session. He added that as such, “we are now dependent on fossil fuels”, and that “this means that 20 per cent of electricity bills goes just to pay CO2 emissions through the EU emissions trading system [ETS].” “Don’t get me wrong, protecting the planet is extremely important, but during this crisis, we must first protect our citizens. I ask the EU to step in and try to fix this problem, made by our government, by giving us an emergency relief,” he said. Related Articles • Cyprus seeks heating oil tax relief To this end, he stressed that “we need to pay less for CO2 emissions during this energy crisis because Cypriot citizens can just not afford it”. His comments come with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis having sent a joint letter to the European Commission, demanding a “temporary suspension” of the ETS across Europe to stem rising energy costs across the continent. Such a suspension, it said, would “provide immediate relief to European industry from carbon costs”. “However, in the absence of sufficient support for such an option, it is worth considering a number of targeted and immediately actionable alternatives that the European Council could promote to alleviate the impact of the current shock and complement measures already announced at a European level,” it said. ETS ‘unjust, absurd, unsustainable’ Meanwhile, Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto went further, saying that “a tax like ETS today is unjust, absurd, unsustainable in international competition, and creates inequalities because it falls indiscriminately and equally on all European end consumers”. Previously, Cypriot Energy Minister Michael Damianos had last week said that he had called on the European Union to offer more support to “address the impact of the energy crisis” during a two-day informal meeting of the bloc’s 27 member states’ energy ministers in Dublin. “I called on the European Union to offer more support and appropriate funding to address the impact of the energy crisis and to reduce energy costs for people and businesses,” he said. After the same summit, European Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen said regarding the measures which could be taken to combat rising prices that “it is important to stick to temporary and well-targeted measures”. “Fiscal resources are limited and we should not waste public money on measures that are counterproductive in a fossil energy crisis, and I urge governments to use the fiscal flexibility with which we have provided them for clean energy investments,” he said. Yemeni govt retakes Bab al-Mandab, crude oil price begins to fall However, better news for oil prices may be coming from further afield, with the Saudi-backed Yemeni government reporting late on Monday night that they have retaken the crucial Bab al-Mandab strait from the Iran-backed Houthi movement. Around five per cent of global oil supplies passed through the Bab al-Mandab strait in February, typically passing northwards towards the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean beyond. The Yemeni government’s retaking of the strait may now allow for oil to flow more easily through one of the world’s critical chokepoints, thus stemming the rising tide of prices. The price of a barrel of crude oil peaked at a little over $106 on September 15, and as of Wednesday evening sat at around $89 and is on a gradual downward trend, though due to the lengthy supply chains involved, it will take weeks for this reduction to be passed onto consumers. President Nikos Christodoulides had defended the government’s reaction to rising fuel prices on Tuesday, saying that “the government has invested more than one billion euros to address the impact of rising prices, particularly regarding fuel, which are driven by external rather than internal factors”.