We pay billions of dollars to Asian countries for the right to continue emitting CO2 here in the West , says Christopher Booker. One could not want a better vignette of the gulf that has opened up between our "political class" and the rest of us than a bizarre little item which emerged last week on an obscure part of the European Commission's website. The British Government, as revealed by the EU's Official Journal, has allocated 60 million of taxpayers' money to be spent on buying carbon credits from the Third World for the use of government buildings and other official purposes -- so that our civil servants can continue to benefit from the CO2 emissions needed to keep their offices warm and lit. The Government has contracted to buy these credits, mainly available from China and India, through 10 British and foreign companies, including Barclays Bank and a branch of J?P??Morgan rather oddly situated in a back street in Oxford. Our entire Government machine -- politicians and civil servants alike -- is now obsessively dedicated to the proposition that we must drastically cut our "carbon emissions" to save the planet, at virtually unlimited cost. But when it comes to the officials and politicians themselves having to make sacrifices, as our own fuel bills soar, they have quietly arranged for the rest of us to shell out 60 million to allow them to carry on much as before. The story then becomes even more bizarre. The contracts with Barclays, J?P??