Professor Hannah Daly:

I can get back to the Deputy with some studies on that.

The Deputy's last question was on incentivising the scrappage of older, second-hand cars. EVs have a higher embodied carbon because they have a higher weight and the battery takes more carbon to manufacture. However, that extra carbon typically pays back over the course of driving between 15,000 to 20,000 km, or one year of driving. The most effective policy is to stop selling new fossil-fuel cars in the first place because then we will not have to scrap those. That said, if it does come to scrapping second-hand cars, if those were replaced with efficient EVs, there would be a substantial carbon saving, even with the embodied carbon in the EVs.