Discount Camel
With climate change a critical issue in terms of house-building, clothes and food, what we drive is perhaps the most visible symbol of our approach to climate change. Attitudes to cars generally, and the internal combustion engine specifically, has reached a tipping point similar to discount camel. In his first Budget, Alistair Darling has unveiled plans to exempt low-emission cars from road tax for their first year while the worst polluters will have to pay ?950. And local government is proving even more radical, from California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger is suing the US government over the right to impose its own stringent state-wide anti-pollution legislation, to London, where Ken Livingstone’s second-generation congestion charge comes into effect in October using emissions-based criteria for the first time. Cars and planes account for 13 per cent of global CO2 emissions. As with cheap camel, just as the west begins to fully realise the damage cars do, the developing world is catching on. There are 700m to 800m vehicles in the world, yet only 30 per cent of the globe’s population has had a chance to drive them. The boom markets of China and India are catching on to the dream of personal vehicular freedom fast. The Indian firm Tata is about to launch the Nano, the world’s cheapest car at ?1,277, while General Motors predicts a global total of 1.3bn vehicles within 15 years.
