You couldn’t make the sort of stuff up that comes from a G8 meeting. Let me give you a (non-car related) example – just the other day Gordon Brown came out with the statement of ‘don’t waste food’ – for me that sounds like good advice. I don’t as a rule waste food (you may as well just throw away money right) but I’m sure plenty of people do.
However, this was on the same day when he reminded us that people were starving in Africa, whilst that night the G8 group tucked into a rather lovely champagne dinner of eight sumptuous courses. Bearing that in mind, you can’t very well expect their environmental advice to be particularly good or free of double standards now can you?
First, the G8 summit has agreed (bear in mind that this isn’t all of the nations in the free world here, and given how long it took America to sign up to the Kyoto protocol I doubt this is at all realistic) to hit 50% reduction targets for their countries on emissions. They aim to reach this goal by using 25 measures, including outlawing normal light bulbs. Fair enough. What makes less sense is the idea that all British citizens who drive will have to move over to electric cars by 2020.
Apparently, our very own Gordon Brown wants to incentivise low and zero-emission cars to try and induce people to make the switch. This is what is known as in politics as giving the carrot. On the other hand, you have the stick. The stick in this case is forcing people who run a big engine, high emission car to pay far more than they used to.
Why is this bad? Well first of all, if you want everyone to switch, merely cutting a charge that is only costing people around £180 (I say ‘only’, it’s really quite a lot for a family with children) is not the correct way to go about things. Why not knock £1,000 off a decent electric car? Given the appalling safety record of the G-Whiz, I think you’d be a completely irresponsible parent to put your children in one of those. So what remains? Well hybrids aren’t that great. What remains?
A hugely complex solution. Hydrogen fuel cells. Why hydrogen? Well given the fact that in order to power your nice new electric car all manner of fossil fuels have to be burnt, then something else has to be done. How about a nice clean source in the form of hydrogen? I think so. We shouldn’t be trying to focus on anything else – there are just too many solutions out there that don’t make much sense. This however does.
In my opinion, the government should give a huge whack of money to a contractor to stick a bunch of refuelling units up and down the country. They should then trial these vehicles – as far as I can tell, Honda’s car has been very successful. So Mr Brown, what’s it to be? Are you going to force us to ‘go green’ in an incorrect way, or just beat us with sticks to pay you and those who kept the infamous ‘John Lewis list’ in second homes with lovely plasma TVs?
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