Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 51)
WEDNESDAY 8 MARCH 2006
PROFESSOR DAVID
BANISTER AND
MR ROBIN
HICKMAN
Q40 Mr Chaytor: One final question.
Realistically, where do you think the oil price will be between
now and 2030 and where do you think it ought to be to achieve
the kinds of carbon reductions we need to survive?
Professor Banister: The first
one is impossible. I am not into the futures market, but my guess
is that it will be quite high in the future, maybe this sort of
level but maybe rising. In terms of the desirability, we could
do the calculations (I do not think we have actually done them)
to say, "What sort of level would it be to achieve the total
carbon saving, given the elasticities?" I do not know what
the price would be there. One could work that back, if you wanted
us to.
Q41 Mr Chaytor: But nearer $100?
Professor Banister: I think the
higher figure, yes. Higher than that figure it would be, because
at that figure that gives 10.7 million tonnes of carbon reduction
and that is not halfway towards what we are actually looking at.
Q42 Mr Hurd: Which European countries
or cities would you point us to as having made satisfactory or
impressive progress in terms of the kind of behaviour change you
are advocating? The answer is not Barcelona, by the way.
Professor Banister: I was going
to say London, because I think in light of the nature of your
inquiry you do not want to travel, so I think London would be
a good place to go to, but failing that I think somewhere like
Sweden is probably one place. Sweden has been making good progress
on looking at alternative fuels, looking at flexi-fuel vehicles,
which means that vehicles can use a variety of different fuel
sources, including biofuels, and Saab have been working on that.
They also have in many cities in Sweden, or the four major cities,
low emissions zones where they restrict polluting vehicles from
coming into those cities. In Stockholm for instance, they have
had, I think, for 10 years now since 1996. There is also Stockholm
itself, which has a congestion charging scheme which is in operation
until the summer, similar to the London one, in the central part.
They have had again the sorts of reductions in traffic that we
experienced in London after congesting charging and something
which I feel the London scheme has not made as much of as they
should have done is that there has been about 20% reduction in
CO2 emissions from transport since the introduction
of congestion charging. So as well as having traffic benefits,
it has had environmental benefits.
Mr Hickman: Unfortunately, there
is probably not one city that you can go to and look the future
in the face. You have to go to a number of cities and see where
they achieve good practice in particular areas. So you might go
to Strasbourg and Montpelier to see good public transport planning,
and you might go to Freiburg to look at how they integrate new
transport systems into new developments on the edge of town. You
can go on and on. You can go to Sweden to look at alternative
fuels and the introduction of hybrid technology. So you have to
look at a number of cities in a number of areas.
Q43 Mr Hurd: Very briefly, your PP1
low emission vehicle policy package is hugely ambitious. What
reaction, if any, have you had from the motor car industry to
that? What discussions have you had with them in terms of the
practicality of going further down that route from the very low
base we are at at the moment?
Professor Banister: I would agree
with the very low base, because for every Prius sold in this country
there are 50 SUVs[4]
sold, so 3,500 versus 179,000 is the order of magnitude. So ministers
may be setting an example, but that needs to be rolled out to
the nation as a whole. We have had discussions with the low carbon
vehicle partnership people to actually do a bit of follow-up work,
where we would be talking through with the industry itself as
to what the problems or barriers as they see it are rolling out
over this time horizon, hybrid vehicles on the sorts of scales
we are suggesting to meet those targets. We are still in negotiation
about that, but we would very much like to engage with the industry
to see what they see the problems and the potentialities are.
At present the costs are higher but with economies of scale and
that sort of thing, with mass production, it would bring the price
down and that may then again become much more attractive. But
maybe they will argue that those sorts of vehicles at present
are only very much seen as niche vehicles, they are not seen as
something—you mentioned JC—which the watchers of Top
Gear will actually want to get behind the wheel of. So again that
is part of winning the hearts and minds in terms of saying, "Here
is a car which actually has a low emissions profile and has pretty
much the performance of any other similar sort of car in that
area of the market."
Q44 Mr Vaizey: I cannot believe that
the other car manufacturers have not seen this as a huge opportunity,
because I think Toyota is rolling it out to the Lexus brand, and
so on. Is it proprietary technology? Are they just behind Toyota
in terms of their research?
Professor Banister: Toyota's view
is that they are about two years ahead of their competitors. They
are licensing the technology. The hybrid is one technology. You
can still make quite a lot of headway, as it were, with the lean
burn engines, with the conventional engine, and this is the way
in which some other manufacturers are going, like Citroen are
at the moment, where you can produce a car which has an emissions
profile which is slightly worse than the Prius but it is in the
same sort of order of magnitude, round about 100 grammes of CO2
per kilometre. So there are other ways in which it can be done,
but naturally these cars are small and they are lower performance
cars, and this again may not appeal.
Q45 Mr Vaizey: Just on the difference
between private and public, because most of your policy packages
are focused on private car use as being the way you can make the
biggest reductions, I always thought that the high-speed rail
links, and so on, would take a huge amount of traffic off the
roads, but your document seems to think that it would have a negligible
impact?
Professor Banister: We did not
mention this before, but I think high-speed rail has a role certainly
within the UK and within, say, from London to Brussels and Paris
and that sort of distance. In terms of competing, we are there,
and you can see that in terms of the market share which Eurostar
has now obtained, about 60% on the Paris line and about 50% on
the Brussels, and presumably that will increase when the link
into St Pancreas is open.
Q46 Mr Vaizey: Can you put a figure
on the contribution that Eurostar has made to CO2 reduction
in the way we have on the congestion charge? Can you estimate
it?
Professor Banister: Yes, one could.
It depends on all sorts of things like load factors and things,
but the problem there again is that all that may be doing is releasing
slots at Heathrow, which will then be used for long-distance routes
or other routes.
Q47 Mr Vaizey: So is that your point
about high-speed rail links?
Professor Banister: I would see
high-speed rail working probably in conjunction with, and maybe
then one is in another debate looking at whether we need extra
runway capacity within the London region, for instance, if we
made better use of high-speed rail to substitute for the shorter
distance air flights. I think the other point is that where you
are in a market where something of the order of 90% of travel
in terms of distance travelled at least, and something of the
order of 95% of energy use is on the road as it were, and by car,
then to actually get any sort of significant switch to rail or
something means massive growth in the capacity of the rail system.
So if you wanted to move 10% of that 90% across, it would probably
mean doubling the amount of capacity that you need to do it. It
will help, but I think it is the order of magnitude that it is
actually doing, so you need to direct it at saying, "How
can we reduce the amount of travel which people are undertaking
in cars and private cars, particularly single occupancy cars,
particularly cars which are using large amounts of fuel?"
Q48 Mr Chaytor: The Secretary of
State has recently suggested that surface transport now be included
in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. What are the implications
of that and if that suggestion was accepted, how long would it
be before it could be incorporated?
Professor Banister: I think in
terms of the timing, as I recall it we are talking about 2008
at the very earliest, but my guess is we are talking about a longer
term, 2010 or even longer than that, because the first round of
the ETS scheme runs until 2008 and then there is a second round
in which they may bring in air and possibly now the suggestion
has been floated by the minister to include surface (transport)
in there. My guess is probably that it may take longer than that
to actually get that involved, but the view I expressed earlier
was that probably within that scheme it is the areas of transport
that would be prepared to pay premium prices for the ETS, for
the right to pollute, and it would be the other sources of pollution
like the power stations and factories that would be prepared to
sell some of their credits.
Q49 Mr Chaytor: In terms of Britain's
position within Europe, because of our high dependency on the
private car we would be in some difficulties there because of
the targets that we would have to meet?
Professor Banister: Perhaps, yes,
but it may—and again I think this is another big issue—begin
to give the right sorts of signals to industry and to individuals
to begin to do things differently. One thing we would want to
emphasise is the lead time which is necessary in much of this
sort of change. Things like pricing and behavioural change can
or should be able to be effected in relatively the short term.
When we are talking about the land use and planning side, we are
talking about the medium term. If we are talking about the hybrid
technology, we are talking perhaps of 2025 as the earliest year
in which that might be rolled out as a major sort of component
of the vehicle stock rather than it just being a niche. It has
a huge way to go and it is the time that a lot of these changes
need to take place. What is needed are the right sort of messages
to industry, whether it is through legislation or through the
taxation system, or whatever, to actually get them to move in
the direction in which one is trying to go.
Q50 Mr Chaytor: So even if the technical
work was done to enable surface transport to be incorporated in
the ETS by 2010, it would be many years afterwards before it would
be possible to see significant reductions as a result of that?
Professor Banister: Certainly
the technology, I think, will take quite some time.
Mr Hickman: Alongside incorporating
air and surface transport in a scheme like ETS you would need
to work on the policy packages so that you are actually ratcheting
down carbon emissions from transport. Again, this is not the silver
bullet—ETS. Even though we would welcome surface transport
and air being in there, it is not going to solve the problem.
You need to work on the different policy packages.
Q51 Chairman: The picture you paint
is not an entirely reassuring one! The twin tracks of technological
change and behavioural change are obviously not mutually exclusive
in any way and given that it is probably easier to get quick progress
on technology than it is on behaviour, would it be fair to say
that that is worth doing anyway and it might, during that process,
help the awareness-raising work to be done, which then might make
it easier to sell behavioural change as a complementary step?
Professor Banister: My response
is that I think we need to be working on both equally strongly
from day one, but we need to be working on the behavioural change
as well. We need to be out there. People are becoming more aware,
they are concerned about the environment and the quality of the
air and they are concerned about CO2 emissions. Let
us try and then take that to the next step and say, "These
are things you can do now." As I was saying, some very simple
things like slowing down or sharing a car, or looking at ways
in which rather than making five short trips, you just make one
tour, or something like that. Use the bike to go and get the paper
on a Sunday rather than the car when it is running cold. These
sorts of things are often quite small, but at least that is beginning
to get people to make small changes and that will hopefully build
up. Some of the technology is potentially readily available, but
the question there is rolling it out on a scale which is actually
really going to meet the sorts of challenging targets which have
been set. That will take some time and what one does not want
to enter into is the trap that technology will have the answer
at the end of the day. I do not think it will do. It will have
to be based on people doing things differently. So I think we
need to be moving on twin tracking from day one.
Chairman: Thank you very much. I think
we have covered some useful ground. We are grateful to you for
coming in and we are looking forward to the rest of our work on
this subject. It is very challenging.
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