More on the Environmental Impact:
This page was updated in January 2021
Transport now the major contributor to UK Green House Gas emissions
Building an expressway will contribute to climate change because the expressway, as currently planned, depends upon private transport – the motor car – to get from A to B. Today, transport is the greatest contributor to the UK’s total output of Green House Gases (GHGs), producing about 33% of the total. GHGs are the major cause of global warming and we MUST reduce our output of GHGs if we want to stop runaway climate change. Electric cars are not the answer because, at present in the UK, their net contribution to GHG emissions is almost as great as that of petrol or diesel cars. East West Rail (EWR) is a better solution to the problem of getting from A to B and should be electrified from the start.
Overall, GHG emissions in the UK have been reduced by 44% between 1990 and 2018.But this is an average figure.Some energy sectors have been far more effective than others.For example, the GHG emissions from the energy supply sector (mostly electricity generation) have been reduced by 59%; from the business sector (factories, shops and offices) by 41%; from the public sector (council and government offices and activities) by 39% and from the residential sector (houses in which we all live) by 16%. These are all very impressive reductions (although we still have a long way to go!). But the transport sector, including cars, has reduced its GHG emission by only 3%, the smallest reduction of all the different sectors considered.
Are electric cars the answer to our climate crisis?
But aren’t electric cars the answer? Aren’t they non-polluting and isn’t that why we are all supposed to be driving them by 2030, 2040 or 2050?
Just think about that for a moment. How do we make the electricity to charge the cars? How do we make the batteries to store the electrical energy?
40% of the UK’s electricity supplies comes from gas (burnt in power stations to produce steam to drive electricity turbines), and the burning of gas produces carbon dioxide, the most abundant GHG. So, instead of carbon dioxide coming out of the exhaust pipe of your petrol car, it comes out of electricity power stations’ chimneys, generating the electricity to run your electric car (this is called the long tailpipe phenomenon). It’s the same GHG and it goes into the same atmosphere, and causes the same amount of global warming.
The carbon footprint of electric- and petrol-powered cars
This Wikipedia article gives a useful table showing the ‘well-to-wheels’ carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of electric cars (expressed as CO2equivalents per km driven) compared with petrol-powered cars. Countries that generate all their electricity using renewable sources (e.g. Paraguay, Iceland) have electric vehicle emissions of only 70gms equivalent CO2 emissions/km. For an equivalent CO2 footprint, a petrol-powered car in these countries would need to achieve an impossible 217mpg performance (sorry to mix up kilometres and miles, and these figures are for US gallons, but that’s the way the table is presented! The figures of course take into account these changes in units). Countries such as Germany, Japan, Italy and the UK have a broad mix of electricity generating sources (mostly a mix of gas and renewables) and the electric car emissions values rise to between 170 (Italy) and 189 (UK) gms equivalent CO2 emissions/km. Petrol-powered cars in these countries would need to achieve a high but not infeasible 50 (Italy) to 44 (UK) mpg for the same CO2 output. The key here, of course, is the source of the grid electricity. Until the UK and other countries reduce considerably their dependence on gas- (and coal-) powered electricity generation, the climate change advantages of shifting to electric vehicles are only marginal. According to this Wikipedia artricle, therefore, our electric vehicles will be responsible for almost as much GHG emissions as (small and efficient) petrol-powered cars.
A more upbeat appraisal of the future of electric vehicles was produced by CarbonBrief in February 2020
Respiratory problems will not change with a switch to electric cars
And some health problems will not be alleviated by the change to electric cars. Respiratory conditions such as asthma are increasing, especially in children and especially in those who live along or near major roads. It appears that the reason for this is not the gases coming out of the exhaust pipe but very small particles of dust coming from the cars’ clutches, brakes and tyres. These particles get into the lungs of the children and cause their breathing difficulties. Electric cars produce just as many of these fine particles as do petrol cars, so these health problems will persist even if we all drive electric cars using electricity generated only from low-carbon sources.
Global warming, the facts, and future threats
We do not yet know how much climate change will happen as a result of the GHGs we have already emitted into the atmosphere. We do know that emitting even more will make matters considerably worse. During this century, average global temperatures are predicted to increase by between 1.8oC and 4.0oC. At present, we are assuming that global warming increases incrementally with each small increase in GHGs. In fact there is the danger of runaway warming once we pass any one of four possible ‘tipping points’ where feed-back processes that are currently coping with some of the increases in GHG are overwhelmed, and other, feed-forward processes take over9. The melting of permafrost, for example, and the warming of polar seas will release vast quantities of frozen or deep-sea methane, a GHG with >30 times the global warming effect of CO2. There are signs that this is already happening.
The UK’s effort to reduce our carbon foot-print
In May 2019 the UK’s Committee on Climate Change produced ‘Net Zero. The UK’s contribution to stopping Global warming’. It recommended a UK net zero GHG emissions target by 2050, but stated that this target is:
“not credible unless policy is ramped up significantly. Most sectors will need to reduce emissions close to zero without offsetting; the target cannot be met by simply adding mass removal of CO2 onto existing plans for the 80% target.”.
The Chair of the Committee, Lord Deben, went even further. He pointed out that only seven out of 24 climate change goals are on track, and concluded:
“the whole thing is really run by the government like a Dad’s Army. We can’t go on with this ramshackle system”.
Yes, that’s from the Government’s appointed Chair of its own Climate Change Committee.
Car-based transport is not the solution
There are many things we have to do to reduce our impact on the global climate system.Projects like the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway that assume increasing use of private transport are a totally unacceptable way to plan for the future.We need to shift from private to public transport.Along the Ox-Cam Arc, the East-West Rail (EWR) is due to be completed by 2030.Originally, EWR was planned to be electrified; electrification (which would cost as little as £200 million extra) was cancelled by the Department for Transport in 2017 and the current plan is to use diesel trains.We don’t just need the right sort of transport; we need the right sort of fuel too. In campaigning against the expressway, we are also campaigning for an electrified EWR.