Professor Hannah Daly:

I thank Deputy Murphy. There are lots of challenging questions there, which is to be expected. I welcome the call to increase the ambition on policy here. As I have alluded to previously, we are not on track to meet our carbon budgets and that requires an urgency to look beyond the current measures that we are taking.

It is not up to me to say whether policymakers should be looking to ban cars of a certain weight. I do not know how that would be designed to protect people who need certain cars, for example, for their business, and how that would affect the second-hand car market. However, I would agree with the Deputy that a carbon mitigation measure or climate action measures that focus just on vehicle electrification is not optimal and one does not get these benefits of moving urban areas to be far less car dependent. Let me make it clear, the primary measure that we need to take is to reduce car dependency in the first place and we can do that in cities as we roll out public transport. Public transport, cycling, etc are less attractive because there are cars. There is a real self-perpetuating aspect here.

I would say that our dispersed settlement patterns in the countryside lock us into car use to a certain extent for a long time and electric vehicles are meaningfully better for the environment than fossil-fuel cars. There are negative consequences from the mining of lithium but that pales in comparison to the damage that burning fossil fuels is doing to our climate and in pushing the Earth past its habitable boundaries. The perfect solution is nobody needs to own a car but, given our settlement patterns and the slow roll-out of large-scale public transport infrastructure, it would be very difficult to see that happening within the next few decades. In the meantime, the sooner that we can fully electrify new car sales, the better for the environment, the more likely we will reach our carbon budgets, etc.

The Deputy also talked about car advertising. I alluded to the smoking pan. We also do not advertise cigarettes. The Government could look at regulating the advertising of cars as we know they have such a negative impact on the environment, on public safety, on air pollution, etc.

I know that in France, at a minimum, the advertising for new cars must include suggestions around considering taking public transport and car sharing. We also have a lot of softer measures. For example, celebrities are often paid with cars, and that may be something that can be regulated. In general, car ownership and luxury car ownership are promoted as something to aspire to. As we do with cigarettes, we can use public policy to move away from that.