London: What fun it is watching again all those smug Volkswagen ads on YouTube, featuring men in mid-life crisis revving up their Golfs and Passats. German carmakers vie with French farmers for their sacred status in the EU. That it has taken US authorities to sniff out the company’s cheating on emission tests doesn’t say much for European environmental law.
But the VW scandal isn’t just a story of corporate turpitude. It is part-product of an environmental policy in Britain as much as across the EU which has become fixated on carbon emissions. Diesels have grown to account for just under half the UK car market thanks to changes the Tony Blair government made to vehicle excise duty. From 2001, punitive rates of up to £500 were imposed on cars which emit carbon emissions of more than 225 g/km, while cars below 120 g/km were treated to token road-tax rates.
As manufacturers quickly discovered, the only way to get many vehicles below these thresholds was to make them diesel. It was well known that diesel engines produced large amounts of tiny carcinogenic soot particles, but this was brushed over. Particulate emissions were meant to be dealt with by filters, yet these are known to become blocked if engines spend too much time idling. Diesels also produce far higher levels of nitrogen oxides, the subject of the VW scandal.
But the problem doesn’t end with diesel engines. Take wood-burning. That wood-combustion emits large quantities of soot particles was not lost on the authors of the 1956 Clean Air Act. Wood fires were banned in smokeless zones along with coal fires. Burning wood also releases nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide. After the advent of climate change emissions from wood-burning have been forgotten. Far from being banished, wood-burning is now encouraged through a scheme known as the Renewable Heat Incentive, which lets owners of pellet stoves claim subsidies.
Burning biomass pellets made from wood is not so polluting as an open wood fire: stoves operate at higher temperatures and combustion is more efficient. But they are hardly “clean” energy. On a larger scale, coal-fired power stations have been incentivised to switch to burning wood pellets. The country’s largest coal power station, at Drax in Yorkshire, is gradually converting all its burners to run on wood pellets.
The incentives were based on the idea that burning wood is carbon-neutral, because it releases into the atmosphere only carbon dioxide sucked from the air by growing trees. That ignores something important: growing and harvesting trees, as well as manufacturing wood pellets and getting them to a power station, consumes fossil fuels.
When the department for energy and climate change eventually did the calculations, the results were shocking. As Britain consumed 4.6 million tonnes of pellets last year but only produced 0.3 million tonnes from our own forests, the vast bulk must be imported, mostly from North America. For every MW of electricity generated by burning wood pellets it turned out that between 0.16 MW and 0.96 MW of energy was being consumed in making and transporting the pellets.
Whether burning pellets reduces carbon emissions depends on what would otherwise happen to the wood from which they were made. If the pellets come from sawdust or fallen trees that would have been burnt by US foresters, it makes sense from the point of view of carbon emissions to burn them for energy. But if the trees would have been allowed to decompose where they fell it makes no sense.
It is an obsession with carbon emissions, too, that has driven policy on biofuels. Again, it makes sense from an environmental point of view to burn agricultural waste to produce energy. Wind turbines, too, have been incentivised with little regard to other environmental problems.
Then there is nuclear power. Remember the “Nuclear power: no thanks” stickers that were the trademark of greens in the 1970s? The problems of nuclear energy have not gone away. We still have the issue of how to store nuclear waste which will take thousands of years to decompose. And while nuclear power in Britain has an excellent safety record, no government has explained how we would deal with a disaster like the one that struck Fukushima plant.
The green movement has gone quiet on nuclear power. Anything which reduces carbon emissions they now reckon is good — even if 30 years ago they were trying to tell us nuclear toxicity would give us all cancer. When environmentalism becomes fixated on one thing the loser turns out to be the environment.
Ross Clark is a British journalist and author
By arrangement with the Spectator
