Britain faces an energy gap, but should we really worry.?

Apparently to meet currently agreed CO2 limits we need to close our old coal and oil fired power stations by 2014. We also need to replace our ageing atomic stations in a similar period. The newspapers are saying that this will leave us with huge increases in our energy bills (�5000 bills) to pay for those changes. Why? Surely we just fail to meet the CO2 targets and carry on with coal until we get the new power stations running or is that too logical. Have these people gone crazy?