Why is Rishi Sunak still banning new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 when even his own advisers and MPs say it’s wrong?
MICHAEL GOVE told us last week that net zero must not become a “religious crusade”. “I think we should relax the pace,” he said, echoing sentiments of other ministers.
But where is the action? A few days later Gove was backtracking, announcing that the Government’s proposed ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 is “immovable”.
Why? Even the chief executive of the Government’s Climate Change Committee, Chris Stark, is now saying the target should be relaxed, on the grounds that electric cars are still far too expensive for ordinary motorists to buy.
Two years ago, US finance giant Bloomberg confidently predicted that the prices of new electric cars would have parity with those of petrol cars by 2024.
Some hope.
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You will still pay around half as much again to buy an equivalent electric car — £31,595 for an electric Peugeot 208, for example, compared with £20,610 for the petrol version.
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Moreover, the surge in electricity prices has put an end to claims that electric cars are always cheaper to run.
Last autumn, the magazine What Car? test drove petrol and electric versions of the Peugeot 208 the 200-odd miles from Leeds to Surrey. The petrol version worked out 28 per cent cheaper.
True, you can save money by charging an electric vehicle at home rather than a motorway service station — if, that is, you have off-street parking. Trouble is, around 40 per cent of British homes don’t have off-street parking, leaving owners of electric cars to fight over an inadequate, expensive and unreliable network of public chargers.
Actually, the difference in the real, underlying cost of running an electric car versus a petrol one is much greater than the above figures suggest.
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Nearly 60 per cent of the cost of a litre of petrol is fuel duty and VAT. With electricity, on the other hand, you only pay five per cent VAT if you charge at home and 20 per cent elsewhere. Yes, there are green levies, but you can bet the Government won’t just sit by and watch while £28billion of annual revenue from fuel duty evaporates. Drivers of electric cars in years to come will be paying a lot more tax in one form or another.
Why has the Government committed itself to banning petrol and diesel cars so much earlier than the EU? One of the great benefits of Brexit was supposed to be to free us from over-bearing regulation. Yet Britain has voluntarily decided to make life much more difficult for its motorists.
In Britain, pure new petrol and diesel cars will be banned in 2030 and new hybrids from 2035. In the EU, on the other hand, petrol and diesel cars will be allowed until 2035, and even after that internal combustion engines will be allowed so long as their manufacturers can prove they can be powered by synthetic fuels made from hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
Since you can manufacture synthetic fuels to any recipe you like, it effectively means that petrol and diesel cars will be allowed on Europe’s road indefinitely.
It is especially mad for Britain to jump the gun on banning petrol and diesels given that we have such a tiny native car industry. Car manufacturers are not going to bother themselves to adjust their model ranges to meet Britain’s deadline.
As a result, British motorists buying a new car after 2030 will be forced to jump for whatever is available. Given that the lower end of the electric car market is currently dominated by China, it is likely to mean Chinese-made cars flooding the UK market.
There are serious security implications from this. The Government, after much agonising, has recently banned Chinese security cameras from our streets after it became clear the devices could potentially be used for spying.
Modern cars, too, present a problem in that their internet-connected electronics could allow a hostile foreign power to switch them off or seize control of them.
Aside from that, Chinese-made electric cars are not nearly as green as some people make out. A large proportion of the lifetime carbon emissions of a car come in the manufacturing stage.
The reality is that Westminster politicians are wildly out of touch with the pain policies such as net zero will inflict on the public.
In June, a massive 62 per cent told a YouGov poll for The Sun that getting prices down is more important than achieving carbon neutral status by midway through this century.
Yesterday, another YouGov poll, this time for The Times, found one in seven Tory voters oppose the plan to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.
Virtue-signalling
Moreover, making an electric car typically involves 40 per cent more emissions than making a petrol/diesel car. This is especially true with Chinese-made cars, given that 60 per cent of electricity in China is generated from filthy coal.
In other words, buy a Chinese-made electric car and you might feel pleased with yourself for not spewing exhaust fumes into the air in Britain — but you are adding to carbon emissions from coal-burning in China.
It transpires that the Climate Change Committee never even recommended that petrol and diesel cars be banned from 2030 in the first place — it thought 2032 was a more realistic target, but Boris Johnson, the then Prime Minister, thought that 2030 was a nice, round number.
That tells you a lot about how much thought went into a policy which threatens to lumber UK motorists with huge extra costs.
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As so often on green issues, common sense went out of the window as virtue-signalling took its place.
Why on Earth isn’t the Government getting the message that this needs putting right?
