The news this morning from “Climate Action in Wonderland” is as follows.

Firstly, inspired by the need to be appearing to do something in relation to the COP26 climate meeting, the ban on petrol and diesel cars is supposedly going to happen by 2035:

Demonstrating the UK’s urgent action to reduce emissions, the Government plans to bring forward an end to the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans to 2035, or earlier if a faster transition is feasible, subject to consultation, as well as including hybrids for the first time.

How is this going to be achieved? Well, David Attenborough has been drafted in to sort it out. So that’s all good, as Ian Fletcher would say. Apparently the AA have described this as “incredibly challenging”.

Here’s a video of Julia Hartley-Brewer asking Michael Gove about how much it’s going to cost. He hasn’t a clue, and makes the absurd claim that all the new electric cars, new infrastructure and extra electricity needed are going to be a net saving.

Quite apart from the cost, I don’t believe it’s even feasible. It’s not going to be possible to produce that number of electric vehicles, set up the infrastructure to provide the charging points, and generate the additional electricity that would be needed. Needless to say, none of these issues have been addressed in the Government announcement.

The second fairytale is that the UK aviation industry is going to achieve “net zero” by 2050 (Guardian, Sky News), despite increasing passenger numbers by 70%! How are they going to do this? Invent an antigravity device? Have planes towed by invisible pink unicorns? Well, maybe – the Guardian article does say that some of the technology is “yet to be invented”.

Again, this is not going to happen. The airline industry is notoriously slow to change – the planes we fly in today look and work much the same as they did 30 years ago. It seems that they are going to use two common greenwash lies: firstly, the biofuels lie, that burning stuff from plants or from waste somehow doesn’t produce carbon dioxode, and secondly the offsetting lie, that planting some trees will absorb all the CO2 that the planes emit.