Action on Air Quality

Action on Air quality written submission to the Commons Select Committee on Air Quality

Noel Lock, Founder, The Greenfuel Company Ltd, Director BRC (GB) Ltd

Diesel kills people

Government policy promotes diesel

Government policy kills people.

In 1998 the government produced the shocking statistic that 24,000 died each year in Britain from air pollution and that the primary cause of this was exhaust emissions from vehicles. These deaths and the far greater numbers of non-fatal illnesses far exceeded the number of people dying or injured in road traffic accidents. In fact, our roads are the safest in the world from a potential trauma injury perspective, something we should all be very proud of. Britain can be world-beating when it wants to be but somehow this air pollution scourge was below the radar. I had found a cause and shortly thereafter I founded the Greenfuel Company with the express purpose of reducing air pollution through the promotion of cleaner-burning fuels. More than a decade later my failure can be attested by the latest estimated death toll – 29,000. Regrettably, we simply have not taken the air pollution threat as seriously as we should have and the consequences will haunt us for decades to come.

I very much hope that the Commons Select Committee on Air Quality can have a positive influence on this currently terrible state of affairs and proffer my opinion on how we got here and what should be done moving forward.

How we got here:

Threat not taken seriously. When pollution is visible it is viewed as a problem. When it is invisible it is rendered unimportant. An example of this has been the recent furore about Saharan sand. As far as I am aware, this sand and dust is made of inactive compounds that have not been listed as carcinogenic by the World Health Organisation (WHO), but you can see it. A glass of water that is not crystal clear is rejected as we understand that what we eat and drink can have a direct effect on our health. A typical adult inhales 14,000 litres of air a day. If you live in London that air is increasingly toxic.

The false trade-off between Global Warming and air quality. I was at an Energy Saving Trust (EST) Conference and workshop where Citroen executives were pressing the case for ‘clean diesel’ despite the concern, indeed horror, expressed by some of the most august research organisations in the world such as Harvard University. As one of the Citroen marketing people put it “Would you rather die from what you breathe or by being flooded?” This thinking led to ‘pollution’ being expressed purely in terms of the amount of tailpipe carbon

dioxide emitted per mile with the smug assumption that new technology was making cars cleaner all the time. This is wrong. The exhaust produced by the latest diesel vehicles has been proven to be substantially more medically dangerous than that of petrol vehicles produced at the end of the last century. Nonetheless, diesel is taxed at the same rate per litre as petrol and company car taxation favours diesel to the point where the new vehicles bought for this market are almost exclusively diesel. This is despite the fact that burning a litre of diesel produces more carbon dioxide than burning a litre of petrol. This is despite the fact that other emissions, both tailpipe and well-to-tank, make up global warming gases. This is despite the fact that various research from around the world has highlighted the link between diesel exhaust and heart attacks, strokes, cancer, autism and various respiratory diseases including asthma and COPD.

Even if switching to diesel enabled us to preach harder at the countries that were not pulling their weight in the collective effort to reduce global warming could this ever be worth the lives of an estimated 1,000 British children each year?

As a matter of fact the biggest reductions of carbon dioxide emissions have been made by countries switching from dirty to clean burning fossil fuels, such as the UK a decade ago and more recently in the USA with the advent of shale gas.

Failure to test properly. Europe has simplistically reduced the air pollution problem to that of carbon dioxide exhaust emissions on the mistaken assumptions that these are more important than all the others and that emission standards would automatically ensure improving local air quality anyway. This strategy has fundamentally failed in large part due to the failure of the testing regime. The current test for European standard approval has been shown to be a very poor mimic of real world driving conditions and styles. Further, car makers have been allowed ever increasing latitude in how the tests are conducted to the point where the ‘vehicle’ under test is no longer road legal. As a consequence drivers complain of not getting the fuel economy advertised and real world emission tests can show pollution up to 500% of published. Other test regimes enjoy a better reputation, particularly that of the USA.

The search for the silver bullet that does not exist. Extraordinarily, politicians seem to believe that technologies that might alleviate air pollution are engaged in a winner-takes-all beauty competition. In a society that values choice above almost anything else this is bizarre and wrong. Over the last decade and more I have witnessed politicians jump on the bandwagon of one technology after another before abandoning it for the next. Clean-burning gaseous fuels were all the rage until it was pointed out that crop-based fuels are greener, literally. Then, as growing disquiet grew about third world hunger and deforestation, bio-fuels were dumped in favour of hydrogen. The latest fad is electric cars.

In fact, all of these technologies have significant merit and a whole-hearted attempt to reduce air pollution in the UK must take advantage of every technology to hand. For many years now all the major car makers have been advocating what Ford calls the ‘Portfolio

Approach’. In spite of this our civil service and Ministers responsible still dream of leading the world by investing trivial amounts of money in projects that will ‘solve’ the problem.

Lack of Leadership and Policy. The last decade has seen too many ministers come and go with the result that the incumbents rarely develop expertise in the field. By way of example I cite Norman Baker in a letter he wrote in 2010.

“new emission measurement techniques and accompanying emissions limits ensure that “Euro 5” diesel cars currently coming onto the market emit no more particles than petrol cars.

So, in summary, the environmental performance of LPG as a transport fuel is on balance not substantially different than that of petrol and diesel.”

I choose this quotation for no other reason than that it demonstrates typical incompetence. It is dispiriting to realise that the Minister responsible does not recognise the difference between petrol and diesel.

This lack of leadership and a childlike attention span has led to a dizzying blizzard of often contradictory policy when what has been needed is a consistency and clarity. It has taken politicians a long time to adjust to the idea that the environment is no longer a subject that is about fine flowing words and as little as possible of anything else. This thinking allied to a lack of operational ability at departmental and quango level has led to a state of practical impotence.

Any witness to the tragic history of EST’s bungled Powershift scheme can understand the likely panic at their involvement with actual technology deployment again. For those not familiar it was a scheme to encourage adoption of LPG and CNG through the provision of generous grants. Over an agony of several years, the parameters of the scheme were changed and changed again, offending many that might have qualified for a grant but no longer did. The funding pot ran dry prompting panic by companies being told ‘cheque is in the post’ whilst the administration continued advising people to delay purchase on the hope of future grants. In the end the Minister responsible ended the scheme citing European rules, an explanation that was rebuffed by Brussels. Whilst the industry briefly rallied on the demise of Powershift, the UK car industry took note and is extremely wary of LPG and CNG.

The brief, disastrous life of E85 bio-ethanol in the UK is another example. The vehicles were provided by Ford and Saab and the refuelling infrastructure by Morrisons. The fuel launch was supported by significant marketing investment including TV advertisements and crucially the vehicles could also use pure petrol. The Government provided the dithering and policy u-turn and so the initiative failed. Still very much alive in many other parts of the world!

Since policy and often taxation treatment and funding regimes are in an almost constant state of flux, the UK suffers from a lack of industrial investment into alternative fuels. As a Shell executive once told me it is sad when investment decisions favour Nigeria over the North Sea due to level of political risk.

By way of contrast the German government offered no grant incentive but a simple, clear, consistent medium term policy. As a result there are now 6,000 LPG refuelling sites and approximately half a million LPG vehicles in Germany. Most car manufacturers offer factory fit LPG vehicles in most of mainland Europe where there are over ten million LPG vehicles and over 25,000 refuelling stations. In the UK, Opel (Vauxhall) produce LPG fuelled Astras at Ellesmere Port for export only. If only we could keep up with Europe!

Moving forward.

Learn from mistakes and emulate success. The mistakes that have been made are very clear and impossible to justify. However, the advantage of such current failure is that there is comparative success everywhere. Whether we look to Japan or the USA or almost any country in Europe there are policies with proven results that can simply be copied. This will however require a change of direction from the Department of Transport. One senior civil servant once patiently explained that what happens beyond our shores has no interest to him since his job relates to what happens in the UK only.

Portfolio Approach. When the major car manufacturers and almost all developed countries are supporting a broad range of technologies, Britain’s ‘eggs in one basket approach’ looks very high risk. What if the rest of the world is right and Britain is wrong? What if it can be shown that this approach has led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths and illnesses?

Fill the Policy Vacuum. Firstly create a toolkit of all the helpful and available technologies. Then develop straightforward, honest, clear and consistent medium term strategies to best harness this mosaic to reduce pollution. Tinker very lightly and always ensure that early adopters are not penalised by policy change. Make the UK a safe place for green technology to invest in.

Better Accountancy. In economics, an externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. Pollution is a good example and therefore a challenge to free-market pricing. It is clearly the case that the country has high debts and not the free will to spend lavishly on ‘good works’. However, current estimates put the NHS bill for dealing with the consequences of poor air quality at £19bn per year. That pays for a lot of clean cars or even a few hundred yards of rail track! The polluter pays principle is often cited but needs to be more rigorously enforced. Tax on a litre of diesel must be higher than petrol since the science is unambiguous on the pollution caused. Taxation on road fuel is a primary source of revenue for our Government and will remain so. Subject to the rate per fuel type, it is also simple to administer and faithful to the polluter pays principle. It also avoids the horrors of large-scale Whitehall IT projects and civil liberty issues that nationwide road pricing introduce.

Green taxes would be far more politically acceptable if the revenue was seen to be well used to reduce pollution. Examples might be to use some of the Air Passenger Duty (APD) to assist all companies operating in airside areas of airports to use exclusively electric vehicles. This

could lead to security benefits and also an area of niche expertise that could provide export opportunities. Rises in diesel duty should be used to assist adoption of alternative fuels.

Deployment not research. Too often public money is wasted on trial projects that have little or no prospect of deployment. The deaths and illnesses caused by air pollution are not abstract and necessarily the solutions have to be real world and in the form of massive deployment. It is simply not good enough to proudly demonstrate five hydrogen taxis for the London Olympics when the remaining 24,000 run on diesel. The score remains 24,000 to 5 (losing). Three million pounds of public money has been assigned to install three hydrogen filling stations in London. This money could have put one hundred LPG stations into our capital. The scheme which results in the greatest reduction in pollution is the one that should attract public funds. Schemes which deliver instant benefit are better than those that hold out some hope for future undefined benefit. A small company in London has recently re-engineered some black cabs to run them on LPG from diesel and the results are dramatic. These reconfigured vehicles now pass the most rigorous emission standards that have been developed years after the vehicles themselves were originally built. Tailpipe Pm emissions are eliminated and NOx massively reduced. These emission results have been verified by Millbrook Testing Ground and the certificate is available if required. All 24,000 current black cabs could be converted in this manner for less than the first year’s threatened fine from Europe and, more to the point, would go a very large way towards addressing what is a very large problem and save lives. Remember that whilst petrol/hybrid taxis are promised for the future a new taxi bought today is constrained to be diesel by the rules (despite the export version being petrol) and will likely still be in service until 2026.

There is no reason that policies that have been shown to be successful around the world cannot be successful in the UK if their adoption is carried out with the same vigour.

Repeat: There is no silver bullet. I have explained my views too many times to know that some people will simply think that electric cars produce no tailpipe emissions, therefore they are the best technical solution and therefore the future so any effort spent on any other direction is a distraction. This is simply not the case, as almost all major stakeholders repeatedly and forcefully state. We must listen to them rather than fantasizing that we know better. Electric cars are excellent but the internal combustion engine is going to power the majority of road vehicles for decades to come. It is therefore necessary that they are using the cleanest burning fuels possible. This is not and never will be diesel. For those that believe that electric cars only have the temporary obstacle of ‘range anxiety’ to overcome I invite you to consider the merits of electric home heating and what role ‘range anxiety’ has played in the dominance of mains gas in this market.

By enthusiastically embracing the very many technologies that are currently available we will succeed in providing our children with air fit to breathe.

Noel LockFounder, The Greenfuel Company.Director, BRC (GB) Ltd.