How to deal with air pollution: ban all diesel and petrol vehicles by 2040 >>> but will it work?

Should it be central or local government which deals with air pollution?
Futures Forum: "Unfairly shifting the burden" of dealing with air pollution on to local authorities

And how in particular should we deal with diesel?
Futures Forum: How to deal with diesel: scrappage
Futures Forum: How to deal with diesel: increase fuel duty

The Environment Secretary has announced new measures:
Petrol and diesel ban: How will it work? - BBC News

The car industry is not impressed:
Clean air surprise fuels growing row between car industry and government - Telegraph
Clean Air Act industry reaction: tone of anxiety - Transport Engineer

Others say it is too little too late:
Diesel and petrol car ban: Clean air strategy 'not enough' - BBC News

Including David Powel from the New Economics Foundation:

ACTION ON AIR POLLUTION SHOULD COME TODAY, NOT TOMORROW

THE GOVERNMENT'S LATEST ANNOUNCEMENT ON PETROL AND DIESEL IS LAUGHABLY UNAMBITIOUS

27 JULY, 2017

Remember VHS? It was the future, once (just ask Betamax). Then came the year 1995 and the birth of the DVD, and that was curtains for poor old videotape.

Since then, DVDs – and even their upstart siblings, Blurays – have themselves come and started to be gone thanks to downloading and, latterly, streaming. The smartphone and tablet, upon which much media is now consumed, didn’t even exist 11 years ago.

So it’s a bit hard to get excited about the Government’s announcement this week that all new petrol and diesel cars will be banned by the year 2040. That’s almost exactly as far in the future as the invention of the DVD is in the past. While a welcome statement of intent on the end of the fossil fuel age, it’s also laughably unambitious. Volvo says all of its cars will be electric or part-electric by 2019; that’s like Philips announcing in 1995 that it wouldn’t sell VHS recorders by 1997. Now that would have made people sit up and take notice.

Obviously, cars aren’t videos. They’re more expensive. More culturally imbued. They directly provide jobs for very many people, and that’s important. There’s a monumental physical infrastructure behind keeping them full of petrol, and of course a great deal of power in the hands of the fossil fuel companies that are very keen we continue to do so. The loans we take out to buy our cars prop up – increasingly unsteadily – many columns of the global finance industry. There’s more to unpick than there was with VHS.  But yet, there are far greater imperatives to do so – climate change and air pollution chief among them.

And there’s a ferocious amount of new thinking going on. Never mind a ban in 2040. There’s a decent chance that the combustion engine will be dead long before then. The collision of three mega-disruptions – electrification; automation; and the ‘on-demand’ connectivity already harnessed  (for good or ill) by companies like Uber – looks set to radically change how cars work, and how we even conceive of our relationship with them.  Exactly how, who knows, but even a toe-dunk into the range of possibilities is fascinating.  As technology analyst Ben Evans argues in a compelling piece, “One should presume autonomous vehicles change cities as much as cars did. That’s just a starting point for thinking about this.”

A new type of transport system isn’t necessarily all sunshine and unicorns. Huge questions of transparency and accountability are opened up. Who owns the data that powers its autonomous fleets? Who is on the hook for the algorithms that decide whether to swerve into the fast lane or the pavement if a crash is coming?  Who makes sure it’s run in the public interest, not to funnel funds towards colossal tech companies with unparalleled power? How will it be specifically steered to reduce transport poverty? And will it make active travel like walking and cycling easier, safer, and at the heart of the regeneration of city centres around people, not the car?

Many of these aren’t questions for tomorrow, but today. The whole point of the Government’s ban is ostensibly to tackle the UK’s killer air pollution crisis; 40,000 premature deaths are linked to air pollution in the UK each year, thanks to pollutants like nitrogen dioxide (NO2) that are well over EU limits. The half-baked set of proposals in the rest of the plan mostly pass the buck to councils to sort the problem out while running scared of one of the things – congestion charging – that would have the most immediate chance of success.

The Government says that diesel drivers must not be “unfairly” treated in attempts to clamp down on air pollution. Do we need to redefine “fair”? As we argued last month, ministers have rather more determination not to put up taxes on pollution than they have to stop us all suffering from the consequences. There are hints in the new air quality planthat the Chancellor may indeed finally increase tax on diesels in the autumn Budget – let’s wait and see.

But without proper interim steps to flat out ban diesels from city centres, like those being taken by Paris and other European cities, a ban 23 years from now is like telling a bullied schoolboy that the bully will be punished by the time he’s 35.

Action on air pollution should come today, not tomorrow | New Economics Foundation

Today's letters pages in the Guardian ask how it will all work:

Switching to electric vehicles may not be so simple

Readers respond to Britain’s latest clean air plan and the ban on all new petrol and diesel cars and vans from 2040

 Business secretary Greg Clark in a self-driving pod. But Rod Logan isn’t as optimistic as Clark about BMW’s decision to assemble an electric version of the Mini at Cowley: ‘The only “go to” aspect of the arrangement seems to be that the key element will be made in Germany and “go to” Cowley.’ he says. Photograph: Anthony Upton/PA

Letters

Thursday 27 July 2017 18.35 BSTLast modified on Thursday 27 July 2017 22.00 BST

So, the government is committed to banning all diesel and petrol cars by 2040 (Report, 26 July). Has it considered the wider impacts?

Power stations will face huge peak-time demand when drivers charge vehicles overnight. Can they cope? Will we face increased electricity charges?

The rare metals in lithium batteries are produced only in inconvenient places. More than 85% of the world’s supply comes from China. How dependent will that make us upon them?

Mining these materials is far from environmentally friendly. Each tonne processed produces 2,000 tonnes of toxic waste, laced with ammonia and hydrochloric acid. Much is dumped into landfill, decimating agriculture and poisoning drinking water. The very manufacture of an electric vehicle can create a large carbon footprint, offsetting global warming benefits. Then there is the issue of safe disposal of obsolete batteries.

We could create more problems than we solve.

William Harry Plant
Crook, County Durham

• The ban on petrol and diesel vehicles will have no immediate impact. The reality is that the decarbonisation of transport will require a combination of solutions. The government should start with the roll-out of E10, a readily available greener fuel containing 10% bioethanol. This would offer an immediate solution to improving air quality, equivalent to taking 700,000 cars off the road. It requires no new infrastructure, is compatible with almost all petrol cars today and provides a practical, simple, low-cost solution to addressing worsening air quality. E10 also provides a greener option for the petrol needed for hybrid vehicles that a growing number of consumers are opting for today, as consumer confidence in pure electric vehicles remains low.

Bioethanol is a non-fossil renewable fuel which, when blended with petrol, has lower NOx and particulates than diesel, and is non-carcinogenic. Our industry has already invested over £1bn in the UK to produce it.

Yet again, we are missing a golden opportunity to take action today to deliver on our climate and air quality goals, and of course to support farming and those jobs in the UK already employed in this industry.

Mark Chesworth
Managing director, Vivergo Fuels

• If petrol and diesel cars are replaced by electric cars then this will reduce tailpipe emissions, but not non-tailpipe emissions, which can still contribute significantly to air pollution, particularly for particulate matter. It will also reduce noise from engines, but not from tyres. Car infrastructure (roads and parking) takes up space that can be used in much better ways that are healthier for the population, for example by making it car-free public space or green space. This will also reduce heat-island effects.

Finally, many people do not get enough physical activity, partly due to the use of cars, which cause disease and premature mortality. A shift away from the car to public and active transport (walking and cycling) can facilitate an increase in physical activity and save thousands of lives. We urgently need a rethink of what we want our cities to be: detrimental to health or promoting health. A shift away from car-centric cities to more active and green cities is urgently needed to achieve the latter, and a ban on diesel and patrol cars is only a small step.

Mark J Nieuwenhuijsen
Research professor in environmental epidemiology, Barcelona Institute for Global Health

• The traffic jam on the M25 shown in your picture (Carmakers fear ban on petrol and diesel cars may lead to bumpy road, 27 July) would still be undesirable even if they were all non-polluting vehicles. Commuting on today’s scale is largely unproductive, whatever the transport mode, in both economic and personal terms. The first postwar new towns, such as Harlow, were designed to be “self-contained and balanced communities for living and working”. For the first few years that was largely achieved, until it was destroyed by globalisation. Today thousands commute out and a similar number commute in. In planning the new developments needed to solve the housing crisis, a return to that principle as far as possible would be highly desirable.

Frank Jackson
Harlow, Essex

• City councils are rightly concerned that ministers’ pollution plans don’t stack up (Clean air plan condemned as weak and inadequate, 27 July). The government’s own evidence shows that charging for urban driving is the quickest way to meet legally binding pollution thresholds. Yet ministers would rather councils removed speed humps instead. Far from cutting the 40,000 deaths annually due to pollution, this would merely increase the numbers killed by speeding.

Meanwhile the vast sums being spent on England’s motorways and trunk roads mean yet more traffic on our city streets. And now councils are being deprived of the means either to restrain urban traffic or to invest in healthy alternatives such as cycling and walking.

If funded adequately, the government’s cycling and walking investment strategy could be a fantastic way to reduce not only pollution but also congestion, road danger and ill-health due to physical inactivity. These four urban transport problems impose similar annual costs on society: about £10bn each, according to government estimates. Electric cars can address only the first of them, whereas cycling and walking could tackle all four.

Will it take another court case before Mr Gove heeds the evidence?

Roger Geffen 
Policy director, Cycling UK

• The latest clean air plan looks likely to put Sheffield back in the fog again. Not only are we choked by “Chelsea tractors” doing the school run and idling queues of traffic, but the decision not to electrify our main railway line to London means that diesel locomotives will continue to add to our respiratory misery.

Mike Peart
Sheffield

• The business secretary, Greg Clark, says that the decision by BMW to assemble an electric version of the Mini at Cowley is a vote of confidence in the UK industrial strategy to be the “go to” place for next-generation vehicles (Report, 26 July). The facts suggest otherwise. The key component for the electric version (the electric drivetrain) will come ready-made from Germany to be integrated into a variant of a car already in production at Cowley.

The only “go to” aspect of the arrangement seems to be that the key technology element will be made in Germany and “go to” Cowley. Good for jobs at Cowley maybe, but rather lame as an industrial strategy. Other countries, including Germany, Japan, China, France and the US, are investing significantly in technology for electric vehicles. If we really expect to be a major player in this new area we will have to invest on a similar scale, and there is little sign of that.

Rod Logan
Walton-on-Thames, Surrey

Switch to electric vehicles will not be enough to give us clean air | Letters | Technology | The Guardian
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