Sir, – The latest report from the Climate Change Advisory Council outlines drastic targets to reduce transport emissions.
Much of the commentary seems to focus heavily on exactly how many hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles (EVs) will need to be in use on Irish roads to achieve these reductions.
While they clearly have an important role, there are big, difficult questions around the emissions required to produce new vehicles and how to deliver sufficient zero-emission electricity to power them.
And this is before we even get to the problem of how to fairly encourage people to buy EVs.
We already heavily subsidise car use over and above the taxes paid directly by drivers, we know that cycling and walking save the State money, and that our public transport is comparatively underfunded.
So rather than tie ourselves up in knots over ways of providing like-for-like replacements for the already huge numbers of cars on our roads, it’s time to fully acknowledge that many people in urban areas only own cars in the first place because other options are so poor.
So while people who are already thinking about new cars should be encouraged to go electric, we can save money and achieve a much more just transition in transport by doing everything we can to take space away from cars and make it available to more efficient, cheaper, and greener modes of transport.
– Yours, etc
DAVE MATHIESON,
Salthill, Galway.