Shoot for the Moon: We should plan to be all-electric by 2025

So much of public policy is reactive, and the recent dire IPCC report evidencing that we have just 12 years to avoid a potentially irreversible climate crisis should be enough to spark an unprecedented reaction.

In the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur shooting, the Australian government introduced sweeping changes to its gun laws, most notable amongst which was a government buy-back scheme that, in the twelve months it was in place, bought back and destroyed more than 1 million firearms that had recently been made illegal, funded by a one-off increase in the Medicare levy paid by Australian citizens to raise the required A$500million. There was strong opposition in some quarters, but the conservative Howard government pressed ahead with the policies; in the seven years following the buy-back, gun-homicides fell by roughly 42 percent, and gun suicides fell even further, by almost 57 percent. The policy was controversial and costly, but it was an undeniable public good, and has since been lauded as a hugely successful piece of sweeping government activism, borne of a national tragedy.

The global co-operation to ban harmful CFCs under the Montreal Protocol in the late 1980s – with key commitments and leadership provided by the conservative Reagan administration in the United States – leading to a reversal of the damage being done to the ozone layer (and where the hole is predicted to have closed completely by 2050) is an example of how huge global projects can be achieved with sufficient collective effort and big picture thinking, regardless of the political background of the leaders driving the changes.

There were 37.3 million licensed vehicles on UK roads at the end of 2016, 30.9 million of which were cars. Pollutants from cars and vans are estimated to cost the NHS $6 billion per year in additional healthcare costs. If every new car in 2019 were electric, it would save more than £325million in health costs in the first year, according to environmental charity Global Action Plan which organises Clean Air Day. The UKs emissions have been falling – albeit too slowly – since 1990, but these reductions have been mostly from the energy sector (which has reduced by 57%), while the transport sector has reduced emissions by just 2%; transport now accounts for 26 per cent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 25 per cent coming from energy supplies. Imagine the impact on the UKs contribution to climate change and our ability to become a world-leader in tackling this existential global problem if these almost 31 million cars were all electric by 2025. The positive impacts would be wide-ranging and ground-breaking, and policy proposals on this scale are what is required to tackle a problem of this magnitude. This means job creation through large-scale investment, and significant returns on these investments, in the development and expansion of UK the car industry to keep up with this ambitious target.

There are currently only 37,000 electric vehicles registered in the UK as of April 2018 – the magnitude of replacing 31 million vehicles with electric vehicles is, therefore, a daunting one. For this reason, a short 12 month buy-back, as in the case of Australian firearms, would likely be unworkable. However, the sooner such a scheme can be instituted, the better.

Firstly, there would need to be a moratorium on production, operation and sale of petrol or diesel cars by 2025; a watered-down version of this already exists, but pegged to 2040, which would be at least a decade too late given the IPCC report; even MPs critical of this are aiming for 2032, which would still be too late, and behind targets for countries such as Norway (2025), and India (2030). This goal would be stretching and ambitious but still give companies time to shift from producing petrol or diesel cars to producing electric ones and allow for retraining of existing workforces as well as – given the scale of transition required – allowing time for increased production capacity to be prepared for through infrastructure creation, recruitment and training.

The buy-back itself would work by reaching an average car price – say £6,000 – which would be paid by the government in exchange for turning over any non-electric car; this payment would be made in the form of a pre-paid debit card which could only be used to either purchase outright or as a deposit on an electric vehicle, dependant on the value of the vehicle being purchased. An exemption, and subsequent alternate pre-payment scheme, could be made on request, for use in paying public transport costs for those choosing to cease private vehicle ownership altogether. Each individual would only be eligible for one £6,000 payment, with no credit being given for people owning multiple cars; additional vehicles would cease to viable by 2025, and this would incentivise people to not own multiple vehicles. As ever, exemptions would be present for specific defined multiple ownership reasons, such as care vehicles. This proposal, as it stands, is focused on private vehicles; commercial vehicles would need to be addressed separately, with a potentially slower, but still defined, timescale for the switch to electric vehicles given the relatively small proportion of the total number of licensed vehicles, and the need to continue to provide goods and services to the public.

Presuming £6,000 per vehicle, and 31 million vehicles to be replaced, the baseline cost would be £186 billion. This is a daunting amount on its face; however, fuel duty currently contributes raises around £28 billion. A 300% increase in fuel duty would raise extra revenue, and simultaneously incentivise people to abandon fossil fuel cars in favour of the buy-back scheme; Vehicle Excise Duty would be increased by a similar amount on petrol and diesel cars and be zero on electric cars. Tax credits would be given for purchasing an electric vehicle, and new increased taxes would be levied on imported petrol or diesel cars. Coupled with the £34billion of existing taxes that go uncollected annually in the UK, and the potential use of new ideas – like a one-off “wealth tax” levied against the top 1,000 richest people in the UK (who have a combined wealth of £567 billion asper a 2016 Fabian Society report into the viability of such a levy) – as well as the fact that not all vehicles would be returned in one go (with the costs spread out over a period of a few years), and the cost becomes much less problematic. Built into this could also be a priority system, whereby applications for the scheme would be prioritised based on the age of the car being traded in, giving priority to removing older, less efficient fossil fuel cars from the road, and again giving priority to those on lower incomes who are more likely to be driving older, less efficient vehicles. A similar prioritisation could be instituted around engine size.

Tax incentives for car companies to switch to electric vehicle production and to invest in new production facilities in the UK would encourage buy-in from industry stakeholders and enable the UK to become both an economic and philosophical leader in tackling carbon emissions.

This proposal is more philosophical than prescriptive – there are huge areas of technical knowledge which would need to be fleshed out to make such a bold plan a reality. At the same time, however, it is action on this scale that is required to address an existential threat to the ongoing viability of the planet. If you can add meat to the bones, or have feedback or ideas of your own, I’d love to hear them.

The challenge is huge. The ideas need to be too. At current rates, Earth will cease to habitable in a few short generations – we have contributed to the failure of our planet. As this failure is all but guaranteed if current trends continue, we should at the very least try revolutionary measures to attempt to save ourselves, and our planet for future generations. Climate change presents the opportunity for some of the greatest innovations and revolutionary policies in human history. All we need to do is embrace this opportunity and try to make it a reality.