Letters

Don’t blow a fortune on EVS

THE Government is poised to announce a £700 million fund to encourage people to buy more electric cars, which will include cash for infrastructure such as pavement gullies for cables to enable roadside charging and grants to make them cheaper to buy.

I fully agree that the climate is changing, whether it is due to mankind’s pollution or natural causes, and whether we believe and accept the most dire predictions of flooding, drought, mass migration and death the impact will be, as Ed Miliband warns, a massive impact on the British way of life.

But how will blowing £700m on a few thousand more electric cars on UK roads avoid, or mitigate, the “climate disaster” when the UK only contributes to 1% of global warming? We should be focusing on resilience.

Surely the money would be better spent on planning and constructing proper defences for the predicted weather impacts?

As well as avoiding the impacts of other countries’ carbon profligacy it would be better way of achieving the economic growth we keep getting told is required to fix the other – in my view greater – day to day threats to our way of life such as poor education, obesity, lack of cheap housing, policing social media, immigration and defence.

This is what other countries are doing. For example Indonesia is moving its capital from Djakarta to Nusantara because of the threat of flooding, a huge project which will boost its construction industry by 8.5% every year until 2028.

Or is this more about shoring up Ed Miliband’s increasingly loopy environmental policy defences and providing an “off ramp” for car manufacturers who face a £15k fine for every internal combustion car sold above their quota limit?

Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven.