Why are Britain's streets still so polluted? Because the car industry dinosaurs do what they like, and politicians let them | George Monbiot

Résumé détaillé

The transition to electric vehicles should be moving apace, but it is not. And why? Incompetence, expedience and cowardiceThis is how it works. An industry puts tremendous effort…

The transition to electric vehicles should be moving apace, but it is not. And why? Incompetence, expedience and cowardice

This is how it works. An industry puts tremendous effort into resisting change: lobbying governments, mobilising the media, pouring money into junktanks. It argues that a transition would threaten jobs, or damage the national interest, or harm poor people, while what it really fears is the cost of retooling its plants or developing new protocols. Then, when the inevitable cliff edge approaches, it whines that change is coming too soon. For reasons beyond its control, it isn’t ready, so the government must delay its plans.

This is what triggered the Dutch nitrate crisis, and the UK’s repeated “emergency” exemptions from the ban on a devastating class of pesticides. Now the same dynamic is driving the UK’s crisis over the transition to electric vehicles (EVs). The result is that, as the global climate summit, Cop31, begins, it looks as if our gift to the world will be a major, predictable and entirely avoidable increase in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Car manufacturers could have seen this coming more than 130 years ago, when the first electric automobiles were sold. For at least the past 30 years, as new electromotive technologies have progressed at speed, they plainly represented the future, and internal combustion engines, with their hard efficiency limits and vast impacts on human and planetary life, the past. Since 2010, it’s been obvious that China, which has not only seen the future but seeks to own it, would flatten our manufacturers like hedgehogs if they didn’t speed up. In 2023, the Conservative government gave automakers seven years to get their act together. And now they wring their hands and claim to be unprepared.

But, unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the answer the government is giving. Instead, on Wednesday it’s expected to cut the target for zero-emission cars from 80% of new car sales by 2030 to approximately 60%.

Both…

Début de l'article, extrait de The Guardian Business. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.