‘We need to put our foot down’

Emmanuel Macron’s French government stated that it would end sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 as part of an ambitious plan to meet its targets under the Paris climate agreement.

They aren’t the only ones either. In 2016, the German Bundesrat, which represents the 16 federal states or Länder, passed a resolution to ban the internal combustion engine starting in 2030.

Electric vehicle (EV) car drivers in Oslo, meanwhile, like most of Norway’s cities and towns, benefit from being able to drive in bus lanes, with plenty of recharging stations and privileged parking on offer. These initiatives started in the 1990s as a way to cut air pollution and congestion in town and city centres but now the primary rationale is to cut climate-change emissions.

Indeed, Norway leads the way worldwide on a per-capita basis with more than 100,000 all-electric cars in a country of around 5.2m people.

How does that compare with Wales and the UK? Latest statistics suggest there are 105,000 plug-in electric cars in the UK (population around 65m) and 1,725 fully electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles on Welsh roads (July to September 2016).

So, plenty of room for improvement, then.

While Friends of the Earth Cymru would obviously like to see even more attention focused on improving public transport and active travel, there is clearly a need to improve the electric car-charging infrastructure in Wales so we don’t get left behind in the EV revolution.

With Wales far off the mark to reach its own climate-change emission reduction targets (40% by 2020) then we need to look at all sectors and transport is a critical one.

The quite shocking air pollution figures (2,000 deaths annually in Wales) should also encourage all of us to look at ways in which we can address this public health crisis.

Now, EVs alone won’t solve all our air pollution and climate-change emission problems but they can play a part in the solution, especially if the electricity used for charging them comes from renewables, even more ideally from small community-scale renewables.

The opportunities for Wales are obvious. Let’s ‘charge ahead’ and be early adopters in the UK rather than lagging behind in the slow lane.

If businesses and organisations work with public bodies and government to introduce a nationwide network of fast charging points, we can create jobs, start to reduce air pollution (thereby reducing the cost on the NHS in Wales), reduce our climate-change emissions and use a new charging network to attract tourists to Wales as they would easily be able to travel around without worrying where the next charging point is. EV tourism is an increasing phenomenon in the USA as cities and states start to target the ‘plug-in dollar.’

As technology moves ahead and EVs start to become more visible on roads in the UK, let’s imagine a situation in Wales where we are whizzing ahead with a nationwide network of renewably-powered EV charging points in all public car parks, in new housing and commercial developments, tourism attractions, hotel car parks and at cafes and restaurants, where people can grab a bite to eat while they charge up their car outside.

There may not be many DeLoreans in Denbigh or Dolgellau and some of us are still waiting for a hoverboard, but I don’t think we need Doc Brown and Einstein to tell us what the future looks like for the internal combustion engine.

A year before the original Back to the Future came out, Philip Oakley and Giorgio Moroder penned a song called Together in Electric Dreams.

We just need to put our foot down now and get on with it or risk being left behind in the slipstream.