Just stop the zero-emissions con

Iam a great fan of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 and listen with growing incredulity – maybe it’s my age or maybe the world really is going mad – to some of the crazy goings-on it reports every morning.

Steve Hobson Editor Motor Transport

Just one example – Just Stop Oil protestors throwing orange dye over a snooker table. What on earth does snooker have to do with global warming?

But a story the other morning got me thinking. A company that makes votecounting machines in the US sued Fox for falsely accusing it of helping rig the last election in which Donald Trump was defeated by Joe Biden. Although they didn’t get the full $1.6bn Dominion was seeking, Fox still had to stump up $787m in damages, the largest publicly disclosed monetary settlement ever in a US defamation action, according to The Washington Post.

If false allegations of vote rigging can produce that sort of outcome, the UK transport industry should sue the UK government in a US court for the biggest con trick ever attempted – namely telling everyone that the sale of new diesel trucks will have to end in 2040 without giving us any idea how on earth this is going to be paid for.

According to DfT statistics, Great Britain-registered HGVs operating in the UK in the 12-month period ended June 2021 shifted 152 billion tonne kilometres of goods – up 8% on the year before.

DfT research shows that there are “few in any” road freight operations that cannot be performed by a zero-emissions vehicle, which may or may not be technically true. But with these vehicles still costing three times current prices, how will this shift be paid for over the next 17 years? That’s the con.