Realism needed on climate change measures
SOME REALISM NEEDS TO BE INJECTED INTO the climate change debate, Road Transport Forum chief executive Nick Leggett believes.
The RTF is “in agreement with the broad mandate” of the Climate Control Commission – and the road transport industry is “committed to the decarbonisation journey that New Zealand must embark on to meet our climate change obligations under the Paris Agreement.”
But, says Leggett, the Forum believes that “instead of setting arbitrary timelines and showing early favouritism towards electric vehicles as the No. 1 solution, we need to pause and look at how this would all work and who would be most affected in the pocket.”
Leggett points out that currently there is no proven fossil-fuel alternative fuel source to power heavy trucks in a NZ context, available in a reliable and affordable form.
Nor is the infrastructure in place to support any alternative fossil-fuel source to power heavy trucks…
And there are no commercially available heavy trucks using alternatives to fossil-fuels, at scale, to replace the current heavy truck fleet needed to keep the NZ economy moving.
“We believe that any policy settings should be framed around there being viable, safe, affordable, widely available alternatives to what is being phased out.
“We want to be cautious about ‘greenwashing’ – that is, promoting alternatives to fossil fuels based on ideology, rather than a real pros and cons assessment of whether or not we are replacing like-for-like and what the impacts will be on people…..not just the environment.”
Adds Leggett: “For the trucking industry, a rush to EVs could mean reduced payloads and consequently, higher costs for moving freight. Less freight would be able to be loaded on the truck because a lot of the allowable weight to carry would be in the battery.
“The idea should be to get more freight on the trucks so there is less truck traffic on the road – not require more trucks because they can’t carry the freight….because of the weight of the battery. That just isn’t efficient for freight movement, and it forces greater capital costs on transport operators that will ultimately be borne by the consumer – not to mention greater congestion from more trucks on the road.”
T&D