The recent announcement by Boris to bring forward the date at which fossil fuel cars cannot be sold, has people asking questions, like:

• How will I afford one?
• How practical are they
• How reliable are the batteries?
• How much will they really cost to run if the government loses 40 billion a year in tax on fuel?

However there are some bigger questions than that, that is the sheer resources needed to make them, and the energy consumed (carbon dioxide produced) to turn the raw materials into vehicles. Electric cars used different materials to fossil powered cars. Also the amount of power needed to power them and if thats going to be wind farm based, the amount of materials needed to produce the wind farms, because we will need a few times more than what we have now.

Neil Spalding tweeted this link today, hence this blog post:

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/leading-scientists-set-out-resource-challenge-of-meeting-net-zer.html

That article is saying we won’t be ready by 2050, because there aren’t enough materials in the world, even if we use all the worlds resources and don’t let other countries have any. Plus we will still have buses and HGV’s running on diesel doing 8mpg or less.

Its ok Boris saying about 2030, he won’t be in power then. Although there are lots of things that should be considered now:-

• Working from home where you can, even if its not for the entire week (after COVID).
• 4 day weeks of 9 hours which will reduce congestion, pollution, and making parking easier
• Looking at bottlenecks that slow traffic down, if there are queues there every day, do something about it
• Driving less miles in the cars we have
• Planting more trees
• Government policy of centralising hospital resources for example, making employees and patients travel more
• Decentralised places of work, so people don’t have to commute as far (assuming they can’t work from home)
• Affordable secure parking, and much more of it near train stations, making trains more feasibile (they may need some redesign in a COVID world as well)
• We already have electric cars with power cabled to them, they are called trains. I don’t support HS2. Its just the same as going to Manchester airport and getting a plane to London for me, and will produce about the same amount of carbon. I do support more railways though, better local services are whats really needed, so they are more convenient to use. We may need much more rail travel to be able to cater for longer commutes and longer distance travel.
• Make cars that last longer (We are already doing that compared to years ago), so the carbon cost of making them is spread out over more years
• Limit the acceleration. Force = Mass times Acceleration, so if you have a heavy car and drive it aggressively, you will use more fuel
• Don’t leave the engine running when the car is stationary. Its a total waste, plus the engine is inefficient at idle speed so more carbon/bad things are produced.
• Consider other options, such as self charging hybrids where the engine is not connected to the wheels, its just a generator. This type of car could be a good basis for hydrogen power to charge the batteries when this technology becomes available.
• Have traffic free cities and town centres, where the only option is electric buses or taxies
• Consider much better rail network so that more goods can go on rail rather than HGV
• More regional airports, so goods go near the eventual destination rather than having another runway at Heathrow and having them stuck in traffic on the M25 (8mpg remember)
• We need to have a really serious look at traffic congestion. Shorten journey times and the need to travel, e.g. have our groceries delivered as this is more efficient than driving through traffic to the supermarket. Anywhere there is congestion should be reviewed with a “Can do” attitude. Including: Having bus and cycle lanes can add a lot of carbon to the atmosphere if they force traffic to queue meanwhile the lanes are unused.

I am sure there are lots more than the ones I could think of above. Lots of practical things that we can do NOW, that needant be too expensive, it just needs thought and motivation to do them rather than just talk about impossible pie in the sky.

Does Boris want to be known as the man who destroyed Britain, or the man who had the vision to actually make a difference? I hope its the latter, but I’m not holding my breath.

Perhaps Musk will go to Mars to mine Lithium? Well whoever considers that an answer to our problems needs sectioning. Just read that report. If we are going to send a Saturn 5 sized rocket to bring back a couple of tonnes of resource, with all the expense and carbon that will produce, then we really are in trouble. It would be easier to invade our neighbours and kill them all so they can’t use lithium we need for our cars. Then lorries? Buses? None of this is going to happen. The sooner they think again the better off we will all be.