THE LIBERALS’ NET-ZERO CARPOLITIK.

The Liberals’ pigheaded net-zero carpolitik

We are now well past the midway point of 2021. (Don’t say this column never delivers the facts!) We’re having a federal election Sept. 20. The results will probably be known by Oct. 1 — earlier if the number of mail-in ballots is less than predicted. Which means that even if the Liberals are returned to government, it will be 2022, and likely well into it, before any real policy gets done.

I mention this because the Liberal platform says a re-elected Liberal government will require that by 2030 half of all passenger vehicles sold in Canada produce zero emissions, while all must be zero emission by 2035. That gives us eight years for the first target, 13 for the second.

Very helpfully for anyone interested in judging the scale of the challenge (i.e., not Liberal strategists), Statistics Canada produces data on new motor vehicle registrations by vehicle and fuel type, though only since 2017, when there were just over two million new registrations for the year. In 2018 and 2019 there were just under two million. Two million seems to be average.

Last year, which was decidedly not average, there were 1.546 million new registrations. The number for electric-battery vehicles, was 39,036, the most ever, up from 35,523 in 2019, 22,570 in 2018 and 9,079 in 2017. But that 39,036 was only 2.5 per cent of total new registrations. Or one in 40, which is some distance from one in two or, the Liberals’ 2035 target, one in one.

According to Statcan, electric-battery vehicles are the only kind that are truly zero emissions — assuming the electricity charged into them is zero emissions, which in many instances it won’t be. Hybrids would help the climate cause on cost and convenience terms that more Canadians would be willing to accept but of course many ecotypes brook no compromise and fiercely oppose hybrids. The real zealots would outlaw personal vehicles of any kind.

The Liberals’ target refers to “passenger vehicles,” while the numbers I’ve just given are for all motor vehicles. Statcan says that last year 28,007 electric-battery “passenger cars” were registered out of a total of 498,031 such vehicles, which is 5.6 per cent, or one in 18. So that’s a little better. But if you look at the average of new passenger-car registrations for 2017-19, it’s 568,000. To get electric-battery cars up to being half that, you need to increase their annual registrations to 284,000 — that is, ten-fold. To get them to the full 568,000, you have to increase their yearly supply 20-fold.

I do understand that the Americans took only eight years to get to the moon. Though we ourselves still haven’t been to the moon our six-year all-out mobilization did help win the Second World War. I have no doubt that if we were in a mortal conflict with a virulent totalitarian regime and our military planners told us that, strange as it might seem, the only way we could possibly achieve victory was to carpet bomb them with functioning electric passenger vehicles, we could re-wire our economy for that task, as we did from 1939-45, and produce as many such projectiles as we needed. (Call it the Mississauga Project.)

But despite the more fevered analogies of environmentalists our current situation isn’t at all like 1939-45. My guess is most Canadians are not willing to make the same sacrifices as our parents and grandparents did in defeating Hitler. Electric-battery vehicles do involve sacrifice. They don’t have the range of gasoline-powered ones, they cost a lot more and they take longer to refuel, while their batteries are bulkier and heavier than a gas tank. All that may change as technology races ahead. But it hasn’t changed yet. Committing to turn your transportation system upside down without yet having the technology to manage that trick economically almost certainly qualifies as a category of derangement.

Given that many if not most of us will not feel a patriotic impulse to decommission our gas- or diesel-fuelled vehicles, Canada post-2030 may come to resemble Havana post-1959, where, unable to buy replacements, drivers squeezed decade after decade out of their big-finned, mid-century American Buicks, Chevies and Desotos. In Havana North we’ll drive our 2020s guzzlers for as long as we can, hoarding spare parts as if they were truffles or gold nuggets — unless, as they may, the comrades in Ottawa decide sometime in the 2030s to simply outlaw internal combustion and diesel engines.

What’s also true is that the “passenger vehicle” stipulation in the Liberal proposal is a big enough loophole to drive a minivan, crossover sport vehicle or a pickup truck through. There’s a long-standing precedent for this kind of escape from regulation. When in the 1970s the U.S. introduced its “corporate average fuel efficiency” or “CAFE” standards, pickup trucks faced less stringent requirements than passenger cars. It’s no accident that in the decades that followed, pickup trucks went from under 10 per cent of vehicle sales to over half.

In 2020, the number of newly-registered vehicles that were not passenger cars was 1.225 million. If the Liberals win, expect that number to rise fast as 2030 approaches.

WE’LL DRIVE OUR 2020s GUZZLERS FOR AS LONG AS WE CAN, HOARDING SPARE PARTS AS IF THEY WERE TRUFFLES OR GOLD NUGGETS.