Incoherent demands about climate change
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Trades (SMMT) has launched a new Go Fund Me campaign. Except, of course, they’re demanding rather than asking politely for our money as they insist that government pick up many of the costs of their business.
We must all pay for gigafactories and fuel cell plants and rewiring the entire country for battery chargers and on. The correct answer to which is do it with your own money mateys. The original ICE plants and the associated petrol stations were not government planned nor funded and nor should this transition.
More than that there’s an intellectual incoherence here. The demand is that both those battery factories and also those producing the fuel cells must be built. But they’re competing technologies. At a certain level of abstraction the hydrogen for the fuel cells is the lithium battery - they’re both ways of storing electricity and being able to apply it to the motor driving the wheels.
Fuel cells only make sense if green hydrogen becomes a reality - if renewable electricity becomes cheap enough that large scale production of hydrogen from electrolysis is sensible. So, if green hydrogen never does make it - we think it will be that’s an opinion, nothing more - then fuel cells aren’t the answer. But if green hydrogen does make it then we need the fueling network across the country. If we have that we also don’t need the batteries and the electric charging points because we’re using the hydrogen technological alternative.
It’s also true that if we have cheap green hydrogen then the manufacturing of artificial complex hydrocarbons becomes cheap - possibly cheap enough that it is overall cheaper to have a net zero system by making methanol, or petrol even, and running it through the extant network of petrol stations and continuing to use the internal combustion engine.
Another way to put this is that we simply do not know enough about how technology is going to pan out for us to be able to build for that winner as yet. Something which does make it rather hard to plan matters.
But perhaps more importantly here by insisting that we all pay for both technologies, both batteries and fuel cells, then we’re absolutely guaranteeing that government is picking a loser for one or other of the technologies will be superseded by the other. You know, as opposed to the more normal situation where government is only highly likely to pick a loser.
It is exactly when we face such technological uncertainty that we shouldn’t be using government to make the decision. This is a market matter. What will replace the ICE? Even, what will replace fossil fuels as the power for an ICE? We don’t know as yet - so we need to stand back and see, not direct.