France deepens TT’s headache

In Europe people are fed up with the old left-right political divide and new parties have been springing up, overturning the status quo.

To everyone’s surprise, France recently voted into the presidency a young man of 39, Emmanuel Macron, who founded a new party, En Marche! and now has got the bit between his teeth.

As the USA backed out of the 2015 Paris climate change accord negotiated by former President Barack Obama, an agreement everyone believes necessary to reduce human contribution to global warming, President Macron has stepped into the breach and assumed the leadership to “make the planet great again.” He has announced that by 2040 petrol and diesel vehicles will be banned from French roads along with any new projects to use petrol, gas, coal, or shale oil, in order to make France carbon neutral by 2050. By setting this as his clear policy objective he hopes to force investment into new energy technologies that have been slow in take-up. Just 1.2 percent of the French car market is electric, while hybrids make up 3.5 percent, but by offering car owners a bonus to trade in their pre-1997 diesel cars and pre-2001 petrol cars for new or second-hand cars he hopes to get rid of the worst polluters and stimulate demand for clean energy cars.

Achieving his goal looks like a tough call since at the moment over 95 percent of new French cars are reportedly fossil fuel users, even if they have the lowest carbon emissions of all cars (Peugeot, Citroen and Renault).

It is noteworthy that France is not the only country aiming to ban combustion-powered cars in the medium term. Germany’s plans are equally ambitious with a 100 percent ban on combustion-powered vehicles by 2030. The Netherlands and Norway plan to do so by 2025 and India even earlier. In Sweden, Volvo announced last week that from 2019 the company will build only electric and hybrid vehicles.

This is very significant as Volvo is the long-standing symbol of durability and reliability among European cars and this step means that Volvo has consumer support for what might seem a calculated risk but clearly they know it to be the future.

Already, all over Europe investment in alternative energies has quickened in line with popular demand as people are increasingly concerned by climate change as a public health issue and it will be just a question of time, a short time, before most economies need a lot less of what TT has most to offer. Where does this leave TT? Not sitting pretty, for sure. We see the problem but I don’t think we know how, in practice, to expedite the necessary changes in our economic structure to achieve what we must, which is moving away from our extreme reliance on gas and oil production. “Diversification” has become a cliché, yet our Government has announced no big policy change, à la Macron, that can focus our collective will.

Our daydreaming must stop some time soon because we are unlikely ever again to have a single major revenue earner such as cocoa, sugar or gas and oil, unless we discover some other unique source of wealth. We are staring into the abyss and time is running out.

I must believe that the Government is carefully considering what cards are in our pack and which suits to develop as economic drivers alongside our fast declining and increasingly unpopular gas and oil production, but it would help if its objectives were clearly articulated to the TT public.

Mo ther ’ s Pension Update: On fifth visit, to deliver more extra documents, I learned that she doesn’t meet pension criteria.