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Motorists will have to drive electric cars for UK to meet climate change targets

Motorists will have to switch to electric cars if Britain is to meet its legally-binding commitment to cut carbon dioxide emissions, a Government report warns.

By Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor
Last Updated: 12:18AM GMT 01 Dec 2008

The Committee on Climate Change will recommend that large numbers of motorists must switch to the greener vehicles by 2025.

The influential Committee, headed by Lord Turner, sets out the major technological advances needed for Britain to meet its commitment of cutting emissions by 80 per cent to halt global warming.

Gordon Brown is a major advocate of electric cars and is likely to welcome the recommendation. He has already called for a million "green collar" jobs to be created in new environmentally-friendly industries. At the G8 summit in Japan last summer, Mr Brown's wife was photographed test-driving green vehicles.

Today's report is expected to say that Britain currently generates the equivalent of 10-12 tons of carbon dioxide annually per person - about 700m tons in total. This must be cut to two tons per person annually by 2050 - about 12 pounds per person each day.

However, a typical family car uses the total daily allowance driving just 25 miles. Therefore, it is not seen as feasible to meet the new targets without largely abandoning the internal combustion engine.

Last month, Professor Julia King, a Government adviser and member of the Climate Change committee, said: "In the long term, C02-free road transport fuel is the only way to decarbonise road transport. That means electric vehicles, with novel batteries charged by zero-carbon electricity or hydrogen produced from zero-carbon electricity".

The Government is believed to favour so-called "plug-in hybrids" which run on electricity but also have small internal combustion engines.

Lord Turner's report, called Building a Low Carbon Economy, will set out a series of five year "carbon budgets" to cover the period until 2022. These will set out how much carbon the country must cut in each period and the technological methods that will be required to achieve the reductions. Whitehall is set to lead the way with each minister given a target to reduce carbon emissions in their department.

The report is also expected to recommend a big increase in carbon capture - technology which stores carbon dioxide emitted from the burning of coal and gas by power stations.

The Government has already cut road taxes on electric cars sharply. However, Mr Brown has met widespread protests when attempting to increase taxes on so-called gas guzzlers and petrol. The Treasury recently watered-down plans to double the tax on some polluting family cars.

Will we see all government officials driving them.

I wonder how much these cars will cost? Will we see all government officials driving them.

Where are they going to get all the "green" electricity by 2025 then?

... major technological advances needed for Britain to meet its commitment of cutting emissions by 80 per cent to halt global warming...

Motorists will have to switch to electric cars if Britain is to meet its legally-binding commitment to cut carbon dioxide emissions, a Government report warns.

Australia: Global cooling fails to cool protagonists of global warming

Europe is shivering through an extreme cold snap. One of the coldest winters in the US in more than 100 years is toppling meteorological records by the dozen, and the Arctic ice is expanding. Even Australia has been experiencing unseasonable snow. But the stories about global warming have not stopped, not for a second.

In May last year, The Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reported that climate change had reduced the Southern Ocean's ability to soak up carbon dioxide, claiming that as a result global warming would accelerate even faster than previously thought. The story was picked up and repeated in a number of different journals around the region. But this week the CSIRO suggested the exact opposite. "The new study suggests that Southern Ocean currents, and therefore the Southern Ocean's ability to soak up carbon dioxide, have not changed in recent decades," it said. This time the story got no coverage in the SMH, and was run on the ABC's website as evidence the Southern Ocean was adapting to climate change.

CSIRO oceanographer Stuart Rintoul, a co-author of the study, said it did not disprove global warming and he did not believe its lack of an alarmist tone was responsible for the poor coverage. But the story is being pointed out as an example of media bias on global warming. Critics argue that the ABC and the Fairfax media are the worst offenders.

ABC board member Keith Windschuttle said yesterday the national broadcaster was in breach of its charter to provide a diversity of views. "The ABC and the Fairfax press rarely provide an opportunity for global warming sceptics to put their view," Mr Windschuttle said. "The science is not settled. "We are seeing an increasing number of people with impeccable scientific backgrounds questioning part or whole of the story. I don't believe the ABC has been reflecting the genuine diversity of the debate. Under its own act, the ABC is required to produce a diversity of views."

Bob Carter of James Cook University, one of the world's best-known climate change sceptics, said there was no doubt Windschuttle was correct. "With very few exceptions, press reporters commenting on global warming are either ignorant of the science matters involved, or wilfully determined to propagate warming hysteria because that fits their personal world view, or are under editorial direction to focus the story around the alarmist headline grab -- and often all three," Professor Carter said.

National Climate Centre former head William Kininmonth said coverage of global warming had been hysterical and was getting worse, with a large public relations effort inundating the media with information from the alarmist side.

“The overwhelming growth in world population caused by the positive birth-rate loop is a recent phenomenon, a result of mankind's very successful reduction of worldwide mortality. The controlling negative feedback loop has been weakened, allowing the positive loop to operate virtually without constraint. There are only two ways to restore the resulting imbalance. Either the birth rate must be brought down to equal the new, lower death rate, or the death rate must rise again.”

“Man possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most powerful combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the world has ever known. He has all that is physically necessary to create a totally new form of human society - one that would be built to last for generations. The two missing ingredients are a realistic, long-term goal that can guide mankind to the equilibrium society and the Human Will to achieve that goal.”

This is a great example of the stupidity of politicians. Does Global Warming exist anyway? Will this reduction by the U.K. halt it? Why did they sign up to something that they did not understand and for which the technology does not exist?

The thing that gets me is if you believe in the whole greenhouse gas thing, methane is far far more damaging than CO2

The thing that gets me is if you believe in the whole greenhouse gas thing, methane is far far more damaging than CO2, yet you never hear the greenies complaining about all the cow farts destroying our climate, presumably because cows are natural...

I realise I'm mostly preaching to the converted here, why does it always come down to it being the fault of cars

If you believe the AGW hype and were pragmatic about how it will affect us, the way forward would surely be to prepare for a post-holocaust world