Boris Johnson’s ambitious plan to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 is floundering as the scale of the undertaking becomes clear. The affordability of electric cars, the need for extensive charging infrastructure, and the risk to industry jobs are just some of the hurdles that are derailing the country’s green industrial revolution. Will the U.K. be ready, asks Matt Oliver in the Telegraph, or is ‘carmageddon’ inevitable?
With a year to go before Britain hosted the Cop26 climate conference, Boris Johnson was preparing to make an eye-catching announcement.
The then-prime minister was poised to set out his 10-point plan to spark a green industrial revolution – and the centrepiece was a vow to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030.
A highly ambitious target, this was five years sooner than the deadline he had set just nine months earlier, which car industry bosses dismissed as “a date without a plan”.
It was also a decade before the target outlined by his predecessor, Theresa May, only two years beforehand.
“Our green industrial revolution will be powered by the wind turbines of Scotland and the northeast, propelled by the electric vehicles made in the Midlands and advanced by the latest technologies developed in Wales, so we can look ahead to a more prosperous, greener future,” Mr. Johnson said in November 2020.
His speech, the Government said, would put the U.K. on course to be the fastest G7 nation to decarbonise road transport.
Yet the new sales ban – described by the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders as “immensely challenging” – represented a huge gamble, with the potential to either turbocharge or tank Britain’s domestic car industry.
And astonishingly, for such a consequential policy, no detailed proposals to achieve it had actually been drawn up.
Instead, Johnson and other ministers hoped the stretching target would cement demand for electric vehicles, galvanising businesses to manufacture supplies and build the legions of chargers that would be required.
“It’s like the classic example of putting a man on the moon,” one former minister involved in the policy says.
“When Kennedy said ‘We’re going to put a man on the moon’, he did not know how they were going to get there. He just said this is the target – and they got there.”
Fast forward to today, however, and the scale of the undertaking has become clear.
Electric cars still remain unaffordable for most households, while a huge upgrade of the power grid will be needed in order to boost the number of vehicle chargers in Britain from 42,000 at present to the more than 300,000 being sought by ministers.
Meanwhile, to serve demand for vehicles domestically, around five battery ‘gigafactories’ are needed in the U.K. – with hundreds of thousands of industry jobs at risk if they are not secured.
Experts say we are now at a crossroads. A report published this week by the Climate Change Committee, the statutory Net Zero watchdog, said that rising electric car sales were promising but work to build chargers “now needs to scale up more quickly”.
Separately, industry leaders say time is running out for Britain to secure the gigafactories that will be the bedrock of its future car manufacturing base. A failure to do so, while sticking with the 2030 ban on new petrol car sales, threatens a jobs bloodbath.
As the clock ticks down, alarm is growing that Britain will simply not be ready for 2030 – and a delay is increasingly likely.
The U.K.’s commitment to reach Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050 will require emissions from vehicles to be almost eradicated.
Surface transport, including cars, accounts for the biggest chunk of Britain’s annual carbon emissions, representing 23% last year.
This was about 105 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the Climate Change Committee’s latest report says, which was 3% up from 2021 but 8% below pre-pandemic levels.
The reduction was mostly down to increased working from home, rising fuel prices and so-called low-traffic neighbourhoods, with a small contribution from rising electric vehicle sales.
But a crunch point is fast approaching at which sales of electric cars – which have much lower lifetime emissions than petrol ones – will need to do more of the heavy lifting.
Worth reading in full.
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What is going on here? This is no accident this is an orchestrated attempt to replace Brandon with the deep states/Soros/Obama cliques next preferred candidate, probably the shallow Gavin Newsom. For those who don’t know he’s California’s Trudeau, but possibly even more amoral. Whatever Obama/Soros etc are pulling the strings on this one.
It is not just the Obamas who want a share of the spoils. Those other hereditary Democrat families may not want to sit back and see it go to the Obamas again. Will be delicious to watch them tearing each other apart.
It’s a bit like a Norman succession in many ways.
Like the Bush’s
Newsom …. or Michelle Obama? What’s the betting they go for the black female. If she announces she’s gay, or better still trans and is really a man, they’ll tick three boxes.
If MO flashes her Shlong it will be close in a run off with GN , two pricks together in fact !!
You could well be right !!
This cannot be true. ——–Why would this geriatric person who should really be looking over lake from a bath chair in a care home somewhere have “sensitive documents”?. ——-He wouldn’t know they were sensitive. He wouldn’t even know he had them. And if he did read them he would forget it 10 minutes later.
He’s been smuggling classified documents out for decades, long before he became senile.
He doesn’t know what these documents were nor can even remember whether his underwear was changed.
So the Yanks would rather have a bumbling, forgetful, senile old law breaker against whom there is real evidence as President, than Donald. Says a lot for TDS in the mass of the electorate.
I want an opinion from someone who he has spoken to recently, like Mitterand.
Trump is now odds-on with the bookies to win, and comfortably ahead in polling in swing states. I get the impression that there are not many swing voters on either side now, and not many in the middle – anyone now intending to support Trump is going to do so no matter what, and the same for Biden. Why anyone would vote for Biden is beyond me, but there you go.
Meanwhile, in other DC news, Michael Mann chose to have his defamation case heard there because its the pinnacle of probity and fair play. John Williams, Mann’s first counsel, in summing up, demeaned the whole show by playing the Trump card against Steyn. In the final minutes of the trial he linked “election deniers” with “science deniers” and asked the jury to send out a strong message to stop attacks on all the other scientists out there. (No conflation of two outcomes there then). Despite Steyn, having conducted his own defence and considered to be the victor in court exchanges, the jury found in favour of Mann and ordered Steyn to pay him $1m in damages. ‘Justice’ DC style!
Democrat cities are gulags.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/oh-the-irony-mps-welcome-migrant-thugs-then-demand-protection-from-them/
Our ever efficient MP’s now want personal protection from the “safe and effective”
illegal immigrantsthird world trash that we are importing on a daily basisThis is beyond parody.
They want protection from everyone so they can continue representing Other Interests safely but at our expense. Imported attackers makes it easier to justify.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-lefts-approach-to-democracy-if-you-cant-beat-them-ban-them/
The author makes some good points about our elites but still displays a naive belief in the ballot box.
Also while anti-elite parties are making gains elsewhere, I don’t see much blue sky here in the UK – some are planning to desert the mainstream parties for Reform – probably majority of these will be ex-Tory voters, but support for Labour who will be more of the same as the Tories but much worse is UP. So depressing that people’s dissatisfaction doesn’t push them further than “I will vote for the ‘opposition'”.
Biden—The ventriloquists dummy. —–But who is the ventriloquist?
Gotta love this ‘democracy’: When the aren’t calling each other Nazis, they’re mutually alleging insanity and/or unfitness for office. Propose policies? Oppose policies? Bah, humbug! That’s not how votes are being won!
In the light of this:
https://whitehorsebrewery.co.uk/product/stable-genius-4-0
That’s at least a decent ale.