Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

That is right. We are still discussing how we are going to achieve these changes. We have seen emissions increasing all the time, particularly since the recovery. We see them going up again now. There must be agreement on what the plan is. There must also be some costings of the different options. As I said, there will be some direct impacts. If we all move to using electric cars, for example, then we will lose revenues from motor fuel duties. Those duties represent a substantial part of the public finances. We will then either have to find something else to replace them or we will have to make some other adjustment.

As I said, regarding the investment aspect, we think the national development plan has allocated significant amounts of money to the transition we will need. The situation in other areas is much less clear. One of the big questions everywhere is how we can bring about the changes we want to achieve. In a purely economic sense, we could regulate people, tell them they cannot make a certain emission anymore and that they must do this. The reality of the situation, however, is that we will probably have to offer some incentives to get people to change their behaviours or to provide some compensation to those who suffer as a result of these changes. It will be difficult to work out what these amounts will be. The point is that we do not know what they will be, but they could be significant.

Electric cars continue to be expensive. Many countries have incentive schemes to subsidise people to move to electric cars or to subsidise the infrastructure to support such a change in other ways. All those endeavours involve a cost. If, therefore, we are going to rely on such policies, we need to figure out how much we think the Government will need to pay to get people to change their behaviour in that way. We can think of sectors that will have adverse impacts from this transition and it may well be that the Government will choose to compensate people, provide them with incentives or to help them with the transition. All these allocations of funding would have an impact on the public finances and these costs need to be worked out.