Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for the interesting presentations. To get down to brass tacks, as they say, can the witnesses give us a label for each car being sold that would indicate weight or embodied carbon - I do not know whether they are the same thing or are linearly connected - and its CO2 over a prospective 300,000 km lifetime? It would be a huge step forward if we could see that information for the different cars that consumers are contemplating purchasing.

Allied to that is my next question. The paper from Dr. Peter Mock stated that the advertised fuel efficiency of hybrid cars was out by a factor of nine in terms of the performance recorded, which was 14.5 l for 100 km, versus the advertised fuel consumption of a BMW hybrid. How can that not be a misleading description if the figures are so dramatically out?

In an Irish context, no car is made in Ireland. Therefore, the embodied carbon of these huge cars does not count in our national inventory. Should there be some system in place in Europe to ensure the thinking about national policy does not ignore the fact that we are buying cars which are imported, with such huge impacts? Is Europe, and the Paris inventory system, unwittingly promoting some myopia in the way policies are discarded?

How was the figure of €10 per kilogram arrived at? Is there some carbon equivalent basis? Is there something behind that or did someone put their finger in the air to see what the market would bear at a given time?

My last question relates to the outstanding stock of cars. One paper referred to incentives to discard them and replace them with more efficient vehicles. If people get rid of a car with an embodied carbon cost of ten or 20 tonnes or whatever and replace it with a new one which has a slightly lower embodied carbon, there is a gain of, I understand, 3.5 tonnes, as stated in one paper, over the lifetime of the vehicle. By promoting the scrapping of cars with a lot of embodied carbon, would we end up worse off? There will be more efficient cars on the roads, but we will have dumped a lot of embodied carbon. Is there a balance to be struck in the second-hand market in terms of what we really promote?