ROBERT COUCHER
The Driver
‘ The Anthropocene’s battering ram’ and ‘the new cigarettes or, rather, fur coats’ is how writer Bryan Appleyard describes the car in his new book The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine That Made the Modern World. Oh dear. Appleyard actually loves cars (he’s been spotted driving a Bentley) but, like many of us, is aware that economic progress and the rise of the motor car have exacted damage on the environment that has to be weighed against the freedom and movement the car has extended to humanity for more than a century, enabling our societies to grow at speed. He quotes Henry Ford, vastly successful with the Model T: ‘The horse is DONE!’
That’s how our great leaders are currently thinking, although noone has yet come up with a fully functioning improvement over the combustion-engined vehicles we depend upon for effective travel over long distances. There’s merely hope that technology will find a way by the time the sale of purely fossil fuel-engined cars is banned in the UK in eight years’ time, and that we’ll be carbon-neutral by 2050. Fingers crossed!
Our prime minister, Boris Johnson, used to be a bit of a car enthusiast. He was motoring correspondent for GQ, the smart magazine for the sartorially aware, where he racked up more parking tickets than any motoring hack ever because he’d just dump a new Lambo press car carelessly on the street and let someone else bother with the double-yellow-line hassles. Now that he’s in No.10, he’s had a Damascene conversion and wants to change Britain to being anti-car and the greenest country on the planet. Some suggest that his wife, previously an environmental campaigner, has turned his head against affordable and effective personal transportation.
As a city-dweller I want to reverse climate change as much as everyone else. We can’t continue to fill streets with more cars, although that will continue globally in the developing world. But to force us all into electric cars, by way of virtue signalling to make our posturing politicians look good, is nonsensical. Britain is actually very clean, producing an infinitesimal 1% of world emissions. We have three coal-fired power stations whereas China, producing around 30% of the world’s emissions, has 1110, with 150 more in build. The USA has 244. But is Britain really so green? We don’t mine our trillions of tons of UK coal but we do import what we need. And we ship in filthy super-tankers full of biomass wood pellets to fire our Drax power station in Yorkshire. Much of that came from Russia, but no longer. Fracking? No, we import our gas, too. Britain’s supposed green policies are the exact opposite.
Even before the tragic and barbaric bombardment of Ukraine, ministers and spads were realising that their policies would make Britons colder and poorer and that the rush to ‘go green’ is not achievable in the intended time frame. Little will be solved by spurious legislation that dictates most motor vehicles must be powered by electricity, because our national grid won’t cope, the vehicles are too expensive and their batteries are not up to the task.
For urbanites with their own power points, going electric might be viable (in London, gas-fired boilers produce more CO2 than petrol cars) but if you want to drive across country you’ll struggle to find charging points en route that will connect to your car or that actually work. With a £35billion black hole in the finances looming, as motorists supposedly leave ICE propulsion behind, the politicos are snapping back to reality: follow the money.
This all sounds rather negative, but it’s important to the way we live. The reality is that we should not be forced into a blanket shift to sub-optimal electric vehicles to satisfy political dogma. As we go to press, Boris Johnson is about to announce amendments to green policies and will surely return to some reality as voters are hammered by the cost-of-living crisis. It’s nuclear, stupid! Meanwhile many now question how green the toxin-filled electric vehicles actually are. At the non-existent tailpipe, maybe. Dust to dust: no way.
A friend proudly announced he’d purchased an expensive electric car. Good for him. He’s keeping his V8 Range Rover and Mercedes as the electric will only be used for local ‘running about’. The green option would have been to buy another vehicle, whose manufacture produces nearly as much pollution as its lifetime use, but electric cars are great toys for the wealthy. And ineffective for the tradespeople who make our economy work.
Meanwhile I’ll drive my green 67-year-old Jaguar, made of simple steel, wood, leather and wool (its oldtech battery can be recycled), while promising to stub out the cigar and eschew the fur gilet. The horse might be done but the personal ICE car has yet to be bested.
‘NO-ONE HAS YET COME UP WITH A FULLY FUNCTIONING IMPROVEMENT OVER COMBUSTION ENGINED VEHICLES’