Electric dreams
Summer madness has arrived early this year with the arrival of the latest bandwagon that cross-party members are jumping on today… electric cars.
From 2011, consumers are to be offered incentives of up to £5,000 to buy an electric car; how you’ll access the cash is not clear (surprise, surprise!) – tax break, cashback, who knows? – but it’s got ‘em all at it. Barking Boris couldn’t resist getting in on the act and last week declared that he would make the City a showcase for electric cars by spending £60 million to put 100,000 of them on the road. Geoff Hoon, desperate to demonstrate that he really is a Transport Secretary, promised to do what he can to contribute to Boris’ pot (and he still has not explained where that particular sum of money is coming from).
Car manufacturers, of course, are key to this strategy; that’s why they are getting £100 million for research… which is a great wheeze, considering they have had electric technology well and truly developed for at least the last 40-50 years (the only thing that has really changed is the size and capacity of the battery which General Motors pretty much cracked this year with the recent launch of the Chevy Volt). And, by Jove, there are some really green cars that you’ll want get your hands on. Take the ‘BamGoo’, a truly green electric car made from bamboo (only in Japan! See it here: http://www.eta.co.uk/Latest-green-car-is-made-from-bamboo/node/11364).
Let’s calm down for a minute, though. Much as I agree that the CO2 emissions from a 100% electric car are zero, the first thing to bear in mind here is that most of these new and wonderful inventions are not 100% electric; they pretty much all are a hybrid of one sort or another, so there’s still carbon fuel being burned… unless you top up with ethanol, which is also zero carbon in output but raises the question of how many rainforests we’ll have to decimate to generate enough of the stuff.
And what about the juice itself? The electric car may be a low carbon emitter but the generating plant that delivers the current is not, or at least won’t be until we switch to a total nuclear solution… which we can’t do for at least another 10-20 years at the current rate of decommissioning and new build. And even if we do manage to achieve nuclear monogamy, the problem we have is that these places kinda like to run 24/7 and we don’t really drive 24/7 (maybe that is the next evolution? Living in our cars would certainly protect us from the vagaries of the property market!). I suppose that is where the battery comes, allowing us to recharge on an Economy 7 type of deal, plugging in at off-peak times for cheaper juice.
All I’m saying is, let’s not all go leccy mad when there are currently more questions than there are answers. And let’s not forget one major fact; transport only accounts for about 28% of the whole of this country’s CO2 emissions, and road transport for about 85% of that figure, so all that fuss and all we do is make a small dent.
May I suggest that for the short, medium and long term we think twice before we travel by car; walk a bit more, utilise public transport and don’t fly if you can video conference – more often than not, REDUCE is the best strategy both environmentally as well as financially. And, after all, the major beneficiary of this posturing is the automotive industry which got itself into a mess because it fully believed governments around the world would bail them out. Let’s not make it too easy for these irresponsible beasties!
