Motorists are an easy target over emissions

From: Richard D Gledhill, Dent, Sedbergh, Cumbria.

THE new penalties being imposed on diesel and petrol engined cars illustrates how few factual truths are being revealed in the war against pollution and how a certain sector is being unfairly demonised.

Electric vehicle manufacturers have done something very clever and appealing. They have replaced carbon emissions you can see with carbon emissions you can’t see.

Yet if these vehicles are charged with electricity from a coal-fired power station, they produce 25 per cent more carbon per mile than a similar gasolinepowered vehicle.

In addition, the lithium batteries have the highest potential for environmental impacts, with lithium mining resulting in greenhouse gas emissions, environmental pollution and human health impacts. In addition, long range electric vehicles have manufacturing emissions 68 per cent higher than for conventional cars. But of course, most of this is invisible to the population and therefore the pipedream continues to grow.

The city of Southampton is one of nine UK cities cited by World Health as breaching air quality guidelines, yet one large cruise ship burns 66,000 gallons a day of some of the most polluting diesel fuel in the world.

The Port of Southampton will often have five or six cruise ships berthed at any one time and each ship pollutes more than thousands of London buses during the course of a day. Consider the emissions from ships using the busiest waterway in the world (the English Channel) and one may begin to wonder how much pollution travels by air over the south of England to our capital city.

We all create pollution either by necessity or choice, but we don’t have the facts presented, nor any say in how draconian charges are levied simply because they suit the Government or environmentalists of the day. Fair and honest they are not and motorists, once again, are clobbered because they are a soft and visible target.