Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the speakers, and the Chair for suggesting this. It is an important discussion. Obviously, the speakers are all in agreement about the problem that the rise of SUVs represents.

It seems we have an example here of the Jevons paradox in operation where, supposedly, an increase in resource efficiency will lead to a decrease in resource usage but, in fact, it actually is the opposite where we end up using more resources. It points to the illusion of the idea of green growth.

I agree with all the presenters that there is a big problem here in terms of carbon emissions, in terms of road safety and in terms of road space that needs to be addressed. Fundamentally, all four of the speakers pointed towards the way of doing this effectively being to change the taxation model to nudge a change in people's behaviour. I wonder whether that does not go far enough and whether it will not have an impact quick enough but also will lead to a resentment and a sense of injustice whereby those with more wealth can continue to drive SUVs and merely pay the taxes to do so. Ordinary workers cannot afford to do so. It leads to a kind of resentment towards climate policy begging the question as to why the rich get to continue to pollute and how come having more money allows one to continue to have an SUV. I want to pose the question, should we not go further than taxation measures? For example, Professor Daly spoke about the change in smoking behaviour.

Professor Daly mentioned a number of things we did but, fundamentally, what we did was ban it. We said that people cannot smoke inside. Ireland led the way on that internationally and that has now become accepted in large parts of the world. Why do we not introduce a ban on the sale of cars for ordinary usage above a certain weight? We do not have a car industry in this country. We have the Green Party in government. Why do we not introduce such a ban?

Slightly less radical than that, why not introduce a ban on car advertising? When one becomes aware of it, one realises an incredible proportion of the advertising that we are subjected to is for cars and they are all pushing this model of a certain type of car - SUVs, etc. They even try to pretend that if one buys one of the EV SUVs, one is doing one's bit for the environment, which, unfortunately, is not true, but people think it is.

Finally, to pose another broader question, the question of EV SUVs points to the limitation of horizons of those who think that the answer to all the problems we currently have with cars is for us to keep driving cars individually, keep storing big hunks of metal that have huge embedded carbon emissions in them outside each of our homes, but change them so that they become electric cars as opposed to petrol-driven cars. It is a limited vision in terms of the kind of change that we need to see. I do not deny that in a future society many people in rural areas will need to have access to private cars, but should we be arguing that electric SUVs and electric cars are not fundamentally the answer? We need a radical shift towards public transport. We then need to have car sharing within cities. I would be obliged if they could elaborate on some of the problems that large heavy SUVs have in terms of air pollution and the carbon emissions that are embedded in them because of the energy that goes into them, but also in terms of the planetary boundaries other than carbon by going to get all this lithium that we are using for this as opposed to batteries related renewable energy, etc.