The great SUV bait-and-switch
Malcolm Wicks, MP for Croydon North and energy minister, may well have felt particularly self-satisfied as he let slip the governments latest plan for appeasing environmentalists. According to Mr. Wicks, the government is considering the imposition of higher road taxes on SUVs, in order to help persuade drivers to switch to more energy-efficient motors. As the proud owner of a Toyota Prius, the car of the moment for the eco-concious fellow who doesn’t want the trifling matter of genuine environmentalism disrupting his busy life, Wicks will have been quite pleased with his gumption. Speaking in The Times, he described urban-dwelling SUV owners as demonstrating “crass irresponsibility” in their choice of motor, what with the distinct lag of mountains to climb and muddy bogs to traverse in the major cities.
They are quite an easy target, these ‘Chelsea tractor’-driving types. Without trying to get too much purchase off a hackneyed stereotype, they are all too often amongst the most aggressive of motorists: surly-looking men with a copy of the latest Jeremy Clarkson toilet-paper substitute stuffed in the leather-lined glove box, or Sloaney women dropping off Chloe at her clarinet lesson before spending the afternoon rear-ending lesser cars in endless shopping expeditions.
The kind of smugness that Mr. Wicks hints at is endemic. Yet it is nothing more than a smokescreen. It is entirely facetious of this government to decry the increase in SUV ownership whilst single-handedly seeking to increase the crowded British skies with a rampant increase in air traffic that will render the meagre CO2 emissions of large cars irrelevant. New runways are planned for Heathrow, Stansted, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and a recent leaked report suggested that the EU is considering a treaty in which the US government would be able to veto any planned measures to reduce the environmental impact of airlines.
In his Guardian article today, George Monbiot takes the government to task for its craven capitulation in the face of the airline industry:
Read the full article here
Monbiot goes on to state that the only way to constrain the industry is for the government to start closing the runways and taxing airline fuel. Yet this would be electoral suicide; the first minister to suggest that the era of bargain flights to Barca for the price of a loaf of bread will be hung, drawn and quarter by first light. It is much safer for the government to take pot-shots at urban SUV drivers, risible as they are, instead of tackling the real problem.
They are quite an easy target, these ‘Chelsea tractor’-driving types. Without trying to get too much purchase off a hackneyed stereotype, they are all too often amongst the most aggressive of motorists: surly-looking men with a copy of the latest Jeremy Clarkson toilet-paper substitute stuffed in the leather-lined glove box, or Sloaney women dropping off Chloe at her clarinet lesson before spending the afternoon rear-ending lesser cars in endless shopping expeditions.
The kind of smugness that Mr. Wicks hints at is endemic. Yet it is nothing more than a smokescreen. It is entirely facetious of this government to decry the increase in SUV ownership whilst single-handedly seeking to increase the crowded British skies with a rampant increase in air traffic that will render the meagre CO2 emissions of large cars irrelevant. New runways are planned for Heathrow, Stansted, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and a recent leaked report suggested that the EU is considering a treaty in which the US government would be able to veto any planned measures to reduce the environmental impact of airlines.
In his Guardian article today, George Monbiot takes the government to task for its craven capitulation in the face of the airline industry:
Already, one fifth of all international air passengers fly to or from an airport in the UK. The numbers have risen fivefold in the past 30 years, and the government envisages that they will more than double by 2030, to 476 million a year. Perhaps "envisages" is the wrong word. By providing the capacity, the government ensures that the growth takes place.
As far as climate change is concerned, this is an utter, unparalleled disaster. It's not just that aviation represents the world's fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions. The burning of aircraft fuel has a "radiative forcing ratio" of around 2.7; what this means is that the total warming effect of aircraft emissions is 2.7 times as great as the effect of the carbon dioxide alone. The water vapour they produce forms ice crystals in the upper troposphere (vapour trails and cirrus clouds) that trap the earth's heat. According to calculations by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, if you added the two effects together (it urges some caution as they are not directly comparable), aviation emissions alone would exceed the government's target for the country's entire output of greenhouse gases in 2050 by around 134%. The government has an effective means of dealing with this. It excludes international aircraft emissions from the target.
Read the full article here
Monbiot goes on to state that the only way to constrain the industry is for the government to start closing the runways and taxing airline fuel. Yet this would be electoral suicide; the first minister to suggest that the era of bargain flights to Barca for the price of a loaf of bread will be hung, drawn and quarter by first light. It is much safer for the government to take pot-shots at urban SUV drivers, risible as they are, instead of tackling the real problem.