No one doubts we need to act urgently if we are to avoid climate armageddon. While the debate has focused on sectoral targets, especially agriculture, we need to move to concrete proposals and implementation. Quickly.
While much of the debate takes place at a high level – off-shore wind, data centres, electric cars, retrofitting (with targets that are highly challenging) – moving towards climat ae justice will take a myriad of small steps. And a key issue is whether we use tax incentives or regulation to help us along the way.
Let’s look at one proposal in the area of transportation – banning Sports Utility Vehicles. This is not a substitute for radical action to extend public transport or transition to electric vehicles. However, it is one of a number of small steps that can help reduce greenhouse emissions.
Sports Utility Vehicles are, in climate terms, highly damaging. The International Energy Agency made a finding that stunned even its own researchers.
‘SUVs were the second largest cause of the global rise in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade, eclipsing all shipping, aviation, heavy industry and even trucks . . . ‘
If all SUV drivers banded together to form their own country, they would rank as the seventh largest emitter in the world. According to Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA:
‘The global rise of SUVs is challenging efforts to reduce emissions.’
Sebastian Castellanos, a researcher at the New Urban Mobility Alliance, stated:
‘To avert the worst of the climate catastrophe, the transport sector needs to be completely decarbonized . . . With the explosion in SUV sales, we are moving even farther away from our goal of decarbonizing the sector.’
Again, the New Scientist reports:
‘The good news is that more people bought electric cars in 2020. The bad news is that SUVs continued to grow in popularity, too. The fall in oil consumption due to the first trend was completely cancelled out by the second, say Laura Cozzi and Apostolos Petropoulos at the International Energy Agency in France. The growing popularity of SUVs is making it even harder to cut carbon dioxide emissions and meet climate goals. “Policy-makers need to find ways to persuade consumers to choose smaller and more efficient cars,” says Petropoulos.'
It should be noted that estimates of carbon dioxide emissions from SUVs do not factor in the manufacturing carbon cost. As SUVs are heavier, their emissions would be higher still.
It should be a no-brainer that we have to reduce the number of SUVs on the roads. After all, there are ‘substitution’ goods; that is, there are less-damaging cars that can be purchased – including electric vehicles, though Jason Power warns that electric SUVs remain a bad idea.
However, SUVs are highly popular. Half of all new car purchases in the US are SUVs while they make up one-in-three purchases in the US. Ireland is part of this trend. Hannah Daly and Vera O'Riordan of UCC found that:
‘SUVs are also favoured by city-dwellers as much as country folk: nearly 19,000 were sold in Dublin last year, nearly half of new cars registered in that county.’
They put the issue in stark terms:
‘Ireland must rapidly reduce fossil fuel consumption to meet climate obligations. As one of the many changes needed, the prevalence of heavy, fuel-hungry SUVs on Irish roads should end. But instead, SUV sales are growing rapidly: 55,000 were sold in 2021 (nearly 55% of all new cars). By contrast, only 8,600 fully electric vehicles were sold that year. SUVs' greater weight and height mean that they emit around 20% more carbon dioxide than medium-sized cars, and far more than electric vehicles.’
Governments will be reluctant to interfere with people’s choice of cars, especially such a large cohort of people. However, when we compare the challenge of reducing SUVs with other challenges – transitioning to renewables, retrofitting hundreds of thousands of buildings, expanding public transport – it is pretty small scale.
One issue is how we implement this reduction. The usual route is through tax incentives; namely, increasing the tax on SUVs. The logic of this is that the additional tax will direct purchases to cheaper and less environmentally damaging vehicles. However, this still results in high income groups capable and willing to pay the additional tax, being able to continue engaging in environmentally damaging transport. In short, they can buy their way out of responsible consumption. And this impacts all of us.
A more direct and egalitarian policy approach would be to simply ban them. This means that, regardless of one’s income, people will be required to purchase other, less carbon dioxide-intense vehicles. Whatever about the issue of commercial vehicles - using SUVs for work purposes - the removal of fossil-fuel SUVs from our roads would help in decarbonisation.
In the overall, this should not be a difficult issue but it requires a government intent on a robust strategy of climate justice and willing to win people over to that strategy. This is just one small rung on the sustainability ladder that we will have to climb if we are serious about climate change and repair.
Now, who’s up for banning private jets?
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