Electric car key to carbon cuts
It’s not just cars - millions of vehicles on UK roads will have to be petrol-free in the next couple of decades. Our new report shows why we need a rapid increase in electric vehicles to reach the 80% carbon cuts legally required by 2050. And we’ve got to drive a bit less too…
To avoid dangerous climate change, the world has to end its dependency on fossil fuels. In the UK, where transport is responsible for a quarter of our carbon dioxide emissions, that involves replacing petrol-engined transport with electric vehicles as quickly as possible.
Our new report calculates this means at least 1.7 million electric vehicles on our roads by 2020, and around 6.4 million by 2030. In fact the faster the rise of electric vehicles, the bigger the reductions in fossil fuel use – and the more the country saves on oil imports.
But we should also try to find ways of driving less in our everyday lives. If we can combine high levels of EV use with improvements in regular car engines and reduced patterns of driving, as well as decarbonising the grid, we could cut UK fuel demand by 80% and deliver a 75% drop in car emissions by 2030.
Source: https://www.wwf.org.uk/news_feed.cfm?4795/Electric-car-key-to-carbon-cuts