[NGW Magazine] A Tale of Two Car Bans
This article is featured in NGW Magazine Volume 2, Issue 15
France and the UK this month both promised to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in 2040.
But the similarities end there, with France already providing a detailed roadmap for how this will be implemented – including tax breaks for motorists who switch to natural gas – whereas in the UK any such clarity is months if not a year or more away.
French ecology minister Nicolas Hulot, part of the new Emmanuel Macron government that took office in May 2017, has wide-ranging responsibility for energy, climate action, clean air and seas. The 62-year old former TV presenter outlined major commitments in a new ‘Climate Plan’ on July 5.
Among these were the closure of France’s last coal-fired power plants by 2022, a ban on all shale and unconventional gas exploration and production (subject to a law being adopted in the autumn), and a transition towards banning all oil and gas production on French territory by 2040.
Yet it was the commitment to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2040, which included a number of incentives for natural gas vehicles (NGVs), that caught the public and industry’s attention.
Hulot, a former environmental activist, said his Climate Plan will make combating climate change “irreversible” both in the domestic and international arenas – a response to a promise made in June by US president Donald Trump to pull his country out of the global Paris Climate Agreement.
France’s Climate Plan is wide-ranging but on vehicles, the government will study ways to subsidise the replacement of pre-1997 petrol and pre-2001 diesel vehicles with less polluting new or second-hand ones, but will also “support the development of alternative fuels – electricity, natural gas and bio-gas, hydrogen" – and give tax incentives for heavy trucks to convert to gas.
“The government will take the initiative of proposing at a European level a new ambitious ‘Euro 7’ standard and fixing as its objective the end of sales of cars emitting greenhouse gases in 2040,” the plan noted. It also said a carbon tax element in taxation of petrol and diesel will be fixed five years ahead in each budget, warning that “studies have shown a [carbon] price of €100/metric ton by 2030 is insufficient to keep the world within a 2 degrees C trajectory.”
Lack of UK Strategy
The July 26 announcement by UK environment and transport ministers, however, came without a roadmap for how the transition to 2040 will work.
The UK government has faced legal action from residents’ groups and the European Commission to comply with EU safe limits for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and the thrust of the July 26 announcement is to give London and other local authorities powers both to implement their own plans to improve air quality and to bid for central government funds to finance them.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling nonetheless said: “We are taking bold action and want nearly every car and van on UK roads to be zero emission by 2050 which is why we’ve committed to investing more than £600mn ($790mn) in the development, manufacture and use of ultra-low emission vehicles by 2020. Today we commit £100mn towards new low emission buses and retrofitting older buses with cleaner engines. We are also putting forward proposals for van drivers to have the right to use heavier vehicles if they are electric or gas-powered.”
It’s expected that the government will make further announcements from the autumn, plus a wider clean air strategy in 2018. But for now, when asked what guidance industry was being given by government on fiscal incentives in the run up to 2040, a spokesperson for the environment ministry (Defra), the lead dept, told NGW: “It’s too early to say; 2040 is 23 years away. The government is moving on its support for low-emission vehicles, but not yet signalling whether gas or electric.”
On July 24, the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) published a roadmap to boost investment in batteries for homes and transport, including some investment targets, while on July 25 German auto-maker BMV pledged to invest in a new unit at its existing Mini plant at Oxford to make fully-electric Mini cars, rather than build them in Germany.
But there’s no analogous roadmap for the NGV sector yet, either from Defra, the transport ministry, or Beis – apart from a little promised extra cash for cleaner buses – and some are left wondering if the July 26 announcement was showboating by the new Environment Secretary and arch-Brexiteer, Michael Gove, appointed last month to his new job after having been politically banished since mid-2016 by the prime minister Theresa May.
Critics say either that technology will overtake the 2040 deadline; or conversely that the evening surge in power demand for recharging car batteries would be unmanageable. Others again wonder how the government will raise the revenue it used to collect at the pump: some £27.5bn/yr today, according to some figures.
Mark Smedley