Richard George, Roads and Climate Campaigner for campaign for better transport

The Government thinks we need biofuels, not to tackle climate change, but to cater for a predicted increase in demand for car travel. The thinking goes that to achieve economic growth, in line with past behaviour, we can all expect to travel further than we do today, in cars carrying fewer passengers. Instead of trying to correct this, the political path of least resistance is to let it happen.

But that means finding a way to square the circle: to reduce carbon emissions while increasing the amount of driving we do. Hence the fixation with biofuels, electric vehicles and scrappage schemes, which somehow might allow us all to drive further while saving the planet. This, in political terms, would be the Holy Grail: government hits its carbon reductions targets without anyone having to change their behaviour.

That biofuels cause more harm than fossil fuels (to quote a recent Times article) is beside the point. Even if biofuels could provide a carbon-neutral energy source without harming the environment, they’d still be a foolish course to pursue, because climate change is not the only problem transport poses:

    * Last year 2,500 people were killed in road traffic collisions;
    * Around 7,000 people die each year in London alone from respiratory diseases caused by poor air quality (itself caused by the toxic blend of gases belched out of our exhausts); 
    * We all waste countless hours sitting in traffic jams, but no matter how much extra road space we add, it just fills up with more traffic.

So business as usual isn’t an option, even without climate change.

Instead of placing all our eggs in the biofuels basket we should be designing our towns and cities to a human scale, with the services we need close enough to walk or cycle to. We know that decent planning and behavioural change programmes work, because the Government has been piloting them in towns and cities across the UK for several years. The only sustainable way to tackle transport’s carbon footprint is to reduce the need to travel, instead of desperately trying to find ways to accommodate the impacts of car dependant development, with its accompanying pollution and gridlock.

But perhaps the most frustrating feature of biofuels – other than deforestation, impact on indigenous people, the use of food for fuel and all the other problems of biofuels – is that Ministers use them as an excuse for inaction. Hailing biofuels as a panacea means not needing to provide people with alternatives to car use, because biofuels (allegedly) make cars greener. We can keep spending our limited budgets building new roads, instead of on buses, or trams, or on making walking and cycling more attractive, because biofuels will reduce our emissions without us having to do anything. Yet even here Whitehall can’t get it right. Whoever wrote the Department for Transport’s Low Carbon Transport: A Greener Future forgot to account for the carbon produced when growing and transporting fuels. Oops! Biofuels aren’t just the wrong solution: they’re a hindrance to the right one. The only way to unpick this problem is to take biofuels – and all the other false solutions – off the table

Richard George is the Roads and Climate Campaigner for campaign for better transport which is the UK’s leading authority on sustainable transport.

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