Imagine you are UK environment minister Michael Gove, the person tasked with cleaning up the nation’s air pollution.
Your country is bound by limits on air pollution levels set by the European Union, but many areas still breach these rules seven years after they came into force. Your government has been repeatedly ordered by the country’s Supreme Court to come up with a plan to fix this fast, yet you know your latest scheme is still inadequate. What to do?
What you need is a headline-grabbing announcement that doesn’t actually require you to do anything. Perhaps something already in the works that can be repurposed for your current predicament.
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For instance, it is clear that electric vehicles are set to replace fossil-fuelled ones. This transition has to happen if the UK is to meet its legal obligation to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.
Your government already aims for this switch to happen by 2040. “Our ambition is for nearly all new cars and vans to be zero emission by 2040,” .
Market forces
In fact, the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, which is responsible for advising the government on meeting the 80 per cent target, has said that sales of petrol and diesel cars should .
What’s more, with electric cars rapidly becoming more affordable and desirable, some think the transition will be driven by market forces, with little need for government action.
Read more: Cutting through the smog on air pollution
So if you go a little further and declare an end to sales of diesel and petrol cars by 2040 to be official policy, claim it’s about air pollution rather than climate change and brief a select group of journalists about it the day before you release the latest air pollution plan, you are guaranteed to get lots of favourable media coverage.
If this was Gove’s cunning plan, it worked.
“This is a cynical move by the government to grab the headlines by announcing changes for 23 years’ time and failing to enact measures which will curb pollution in UK towns and cities now,” says Oliver Hayes, air pollution campaigner for the charity Friends of the Earth.
To be fair to Gove, not everyone sees it as a cynical ploy. “Big bold statements can be helpful in setting the direction of travel,” says , who studies environmental issues for the think tank Policy Exchange.
Falling cost
But Howard questions whether a ban on sales is necessary. He thinks the falling cost of electric cars means they will become the default option sometime in the 2020s.
Amid the favourable reporting, the government’s latest air pollution plan was It is already being criticised by campaigners. For instance, it will be left to local authorities to decide on whether to introduce charging schemes to stop the dirtiest vehicles entering areas with pollution problems. The critics say this is a cop-out, but the government claims that in some towns high pollution levels are limited to a few streets and so such schemes are unnecessary.
And despite many calls for a scrappage scheme to help get dirty diesel vehicles off the roads, the government still hasn’t made a decision to do so. It merely plans for yet more consultations.
“Having been told to go back to the drawing board so many times, that the government’s final air quality plan still lacks sufficiently strong measures to clean our air is frankly inexcusable,” says Neena Modi, president of the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. “Air pollution is a public health emergency.”
If ClientEarth, the campaign group that keeps challenging the UK government’s action on air pollution in court, also deems the plan inadequate, the government could be dragged back before the judges again. Gove had better start thinking up his next headline-grabber.
