The enemy of the good

The expression ‘Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good’ can be traced back to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, but the sentiment is first found in English in Shakespeare’s King Lear where the Duke of Albany warns that in “striving to be better, oft we mar what’s well.”

Robert Watson-Watt, the man who invented radar and therefore arguably saved 20th century European democracy, propounded a “cult of the imperfect,” saying: “Give them the third-best to go on with, the second-best comes too late, the best never comes.”

Watson-Watt’s ‘third-best’ Chain Home radar network (the first of its kind in the world) was just good enough to stop the RAF losing the Battle of Britain in 1940.

But in seeking a path to carbon reduction from transport, are we in fact turning the perfect (zero-emissions electric vehicles) into the enemy of the good (low-emissions vehicles)?

On the truck front, sales of new combustionengines are banned on vehicles under 26-tonnes GVW from 2035, and at all weights from 2040. That doesn’t mean a ban on their operation, of course, and many will soldier on for years, or even decades, after those dates. It’s an ambitious target though, when the announcement was made in November 2021, the UK was said to be set to be the first nation in the world to ban new diesel trucks.

Before we find out whether these targets can be met, let’s look first at who made the decision and why.

It appears to have been the then Prime Minister, a man well-known for impulsive behaviour in both his political and personal life. He is understood to have been heavily influenced on his journey towards environmentalism by his new wife, and to the ban on fossil-fuel vehicles by a presentation on climate change from the Met Office.

Our esteemed former Prime Minister appears to have not had a science-based education: although it is a great springboard for a political career, Eton is not renowned as a great scientific school and the future PM’s university days were devoted to self-promotion and the study of ancient Greek fairytales.

So when the Met Office presented him with a ‘worst case but least likely’ scenario for man-made global warming, he understandably failed to grasp the nature of what he was being shown.

As Professor Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado, explained on Twitter: “Remarkably, the scientists briefing Boris Johnson on climate altered a figure from gov’t climate assessment to remove the more plausible worst case RCP4.5 scenario original so as to emphasize the implausible RCP8.5.”

No doubt they had good reasons for doing this. Some observers have even commented that it was right to be as alarmist as possible to get the PM to take the most drastic action that he could. In other words, telling halftruths to achieve a desirable goal: something that many politicians are of course familiar with.

So how is the decarbonisation of the UK’s vehicle fleet going?

Not as well as it should, it seems. According to research by Forbes, 62 per cent of British people think the UK will not be ready for the ban for cars and vans in 2030, and 42 per cent think the ban should be scrapped. AA research shows that the number of motorists prepared to consider buying an EV is falling: from 25 per cent to less than a fifth, and vehicle sales platform AutoTrader reports interest in new EVs has fallen by about twothirds from its peak.

This is reflected in used car values: the current AutoTrader has a pair of comparable two-year-old VWs for sale, and they are at similar prices: a petrol Golf for £18,000 and an electric ID3 for £18,500. So, what’s the problem?

Well, the ticket price of the Golf when new was £23,300, the ID3 £37,715. In two years, the petrol car has dropped £4500, and the BEV a staggering £19,215! As this issue goes to press, VW has announced drastic cuts in its production of BEVs, and looking at the figures above, it’s not hard to see why.

Electric trucks may well be perfect from a carbon and air-quality (if not an operational and economic) point of view, but is it really sensible to pursue them to the exclusion of all other solutions and abandon very good technology such as hydrogen combustion to meet a questionable target?

Matthew Eisenegger, Publisher