Britain’s cars may go electric by 2025

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

BRITAIN’S roads would become green, clean and silent if the plans to be set out by the government’s Committee on Climate Change tomorrow were realised.
It will warn that motorists must get rid of their dependence on the internal combustion engine and switch in large numbers to vehicles powered by electricity, hydrogen and other low or zero-emission fuels.
The recommendation will be contained in Building a Low Carbon Economy - the UK's Contribution to Tackling Climate Change, the inaugural report of the committee, chaired by Lord Adair Turner.
The 500-page report will set out what Britain needs to do if it is to achieve the 80% target for cutting emissions it has set itself. It will say that, currently, Britain generates the equivalent of 10-12 tons of CO2 annually per person - about 700m tons in total.
This must be cut to two tons a person by 2050, equivalent to about 12lb of CO2 per person each day.
The report will warn such cuts are impossible while internal combustion engines are the main means for propelling cars. A typical family car emits 11-13lb of CO2, a day’s “allowance”, in 25 miles of motoring.
Last month, Professor Julia King, a committee member, told the Royal Society that the days of the internal combustion engine were numbered.
“In the long term, CO2-free road transport fuel is the only way to decarbonise road transport,” she said.
“That means electric vehicles, with novel batteries charged by zero-carbon electricity or hydrogen produced from zero-carbon electricity.”
King believes a concerted effort could see cars that emit 50% less CO2 than today’s dominating Britain’s roads by 2025. Most of them would be plug-in hybrids with an electric system incorporating a small internal combustion engine.
Tomorrow, Turner will also publish Britain’s first “carbon budgets", one for each of the three five-year periods between 2008 and 2022.
These will set out the amounts by which Britain must cut its emissions in each of these time frames. These will be legally binding on the government and the report will set out a range of technological methods to achieve this.
For the power industry, which generates a third of Britain’s greenhouse gases, it will recommend big investment in research into carbon sequestra-tion, in which CO2 from burning coal and gas is captured and stored permanently, most likely underground.