James Lelyveld's Blog

So I don’t want to be negative about any scheme to cut carbon emissions, but there are some quite major flaws in this as a stand alone program. For those of you who haven’t seen, the government are offering a £5,000 incentive to anyone buying an electric car. This looks great on the surface but I’m wondering just how much the environment will really benefit from this scheme.

My initial concern is with cost, electric cars are expensive, I suspect £5,000 isn’t going to tip the balance towards one unless you had pretty much already decided. Regardless of that however the main problem I can see is that this incentive looks like it’s doing something but doesn’t actually change the amount of Carbon being emitted. Even if everyone switched to electric cars tomorrow we’d still need to get the power to charge them from somewhere – which means power stations and our current infrastructure couldn’t stand the load. Unless we make our power generation greener switching to electric cars will make no odds to the environment, (aside from making people feel better), whilst distracting people from solutions that would make a difference.

To my mind the money would be better spent investing in renewable energy and enforcing cuts on industry but then that doesn’t make as good press…