Green activist and campaigner Geoff Beacon says it’s time our city took a stand – and this is a good place to start
A House of Commons select committee has told us we must get rid of private cars to save the climate.
Politically that’s more-or-less impossible, even if life on Earth is in danger, so is there anywhere we can make a start?
One start would be to ban some of the worst offenders from York city centre. These are the sports utility vehicles.
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The political advantage is that SUVs are usually owned by the rich and affluent, and the rich and affluent cause more pollution than the rest of us – and they are ‘the few’.
And the damage from SUVs can be compared to York’s declaration of a climate emergency in 2019.
A report by Professor Gouldson set the remaining budget for York, the amount of greenhouse gases we can still emit to comply with the climate emergency. The report estimated that, on average, York citizens must emit less than 48 tonnes (of CO2e) each.
According to the bible for carbon footprints, How Bad Are Bananas, the emissions from making a Range Rover Sport HSE exceeds this, at 49 to 51 tonnes CO2e.
That’s about five times the emissions from making a Citroen C1 or nearly three times the emissions from making a Ford Focus Titanium.
In a lifetime of driving, these cars cause climate destroying emissions nearly as great as the emissions from their manufacture, but manufacturing emissions are so great to mean that a switch to electric cars won’t reduce cars’ climate impact enough – even if electricity can be decarbonised soon.
A good start
There are other less important reasons for banning these vehicles.
The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) has called for a ban on SUVs in towns and cities in a bid to cut cyclist and pedestrian fatalities. There are disputes about this analysis, but which would you prefer to hit you: a Citroen C1, weighing 0.8 tonnes or a Range Rover Sport weighing 2.4 tonnes?
The answer, of course is neither. Even a Citroen C1 is too heavy and too fast to whizz around our cities. (Looking at the traffic jams in York, ‘whizz around’ does not fit the facts).
We need to get rid of most cars in York, particularly in the centre. A good start would be to ban SUVs, except for serious business use.
It may be politically achievable because SUVs are still in the minority, and like most minorities their voices can be sidelined and ridiculed. As Rab wrote in UK climbing in 2007:
My theory is that the type of people that buy these vehicles are generally unthinking types of people who get seduced (conned even) by clever advertisers which sell them something totally unsuitable for their needs…They’ve just seen an ad that has associated a vehicle with driving on some empty Scottish dirt road and not really figured out that most of their driving is either on a motorway or stuck in town traffic.
Unfair – but this is politics.