EMISSIONS:Minister for the Eradication of Exhaust Pipes Eamon Ryan is a right little dynamo these days., writes KILIAN DOYLE
His latest wheeze is leading the charge, if you’ll excuse the pun, towards having 230,000 Irish motorists driving electric cars by 2020.
The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate Change later tried to flick his switch by suggesting the true target should be 350,000.
Whatever the figure, I’m largely in approval. However, I feel it would be remiss not to raise a few cautionary points before we all lose the run of ourselves and start stockpiling extension leads.
First, electric cars are silent. Unless it becomes mandatory for them to be fitted with an engine sound generator to warn people they’re coming, there’ll be carnage. Pedestrians – particularly the blind and the blind drunk – will be skittled in their thousands. Lotus and Toyota are already working on artificial engine noises for electric cars. Which sounds like a roaring good idea. I’ll have a 1969 Dodge Charger, thanks.
Then there’s the batteries. At present, the drive among most major car companies developing batteries is towards using lithium, which is light, energy-efficient and quickly rechargeable.
The problem is that experts predict the global demand will outstrip supply in less than 10 years unless new sources are found.
Which brings us neatly to Ireland’s favourite new bogeyman, Bolivian president Evo Morales. (Personally, I quite like Morales, mostly because he is that rare breed, a revolutionary socialist. Just like Joe Higgins, but unlike Bertie Ahern, who was just a revolting one.)
While many may have been irked by his bonkers claims that Ireland was involved in a murky plot to bump him off, he has a right to be paranoid. Why? Other than the internal political foes festering in his fine little country, he is sitting on a potential time-bomb – namely, massive reserves of lithium.
Half of all global supplies lie, untapped, under the Salar de Uyuni salt flats high in the Andes. Morales, understandably, wants to stop this precious resource being plundered by foreign companies, like his country’s copper, silver and tin were in the past. He’s warning firms lining up to extract the lithium that they’ll not only have to pay handsomely for the privilege, but manufacture batteries and even cars in Bolivia too.
All very commendable, but Morales's principles could potentially leave him in deep guano. For the fear is that once lithium supplies get tight, some lithium-hungry nation fed up with his demands will foment a coup, á la Kissinger in Chile, on some spurious pretext – such as claiming he's a narco-terrorist or a threat to democracy – and it'll be hasta la vistaEvo.
While I’d love to be pottering around in an emissions-free electric car in a decade, I’d prefer if it didn’t have the blood of Andean peasants all over the bonnet, if you get my drift.
Finally, there’s the small matter of the electricity itself. If we were all to switch to electric cars overnight, the whole grid would collapse into a tangled, fizzing heap. And if we do spend the next decade building more power stations to cope with the demands of electrified motorists, what are we to power them with?
The obvious answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind. We’ve buckets of the stuff, more than enough to power all our cars. But turning it into electricity is going to take some serious concerted effort and ingenuity across the spectrum. In this country of bickering headless chickens, where getting anyone to pull together on anything is like trying to teach synchronised swimming to camels, I’m not holding my breath.
So, will we achieve Ryan’s lofty goal of 230,000 wind-powered electric cars by 2020? Who knows? I realise you’ve come to expect an uncanny knack for novel answers from me, but in this case I admit I haven’t a breeze.