World EV Day: Exclusive interview with leading climatologist

Select Car Leasing is celebrating ‘sustainable e-mobility’ to mark World EV Day (Sept 9th).

Running since 2020, World EV Day represents a global movement ‘driving change, together’ as the planet looks to the advantages of electric vehicles.

Founded by sustainability media company ‘Green.TV’, headquartered in Oxford, the idea behind the Day is to ‘shift the transition to sustainable transport with consumer, business and policy outcomes’.

There will be EV meet-ups across the world while you can also sign a unique online pledge to make your next car or business fleet an electric one.

Here at Select Car Leasing, we’re fully-behind the electric revolution. 

We have a dedicated Select Electric division, and our web pages contain numerous guides explaining just how beneficial EV ownership can be. We hosted the 'Select Electric Motor Show' event at last year's British Motor Show, highlighting the very best EVs on offer and guiding visitors around these vehicles. And we've also partnered with firms such as Egg and InstaVolt to ensure pathways to affordable EV charging.

The stats also reveal their own story.

According to Data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), demand for pure battery electric vehicles (BEVs) increased by 56% from January to June 2022 compared to the year before. EVs and plug-in hybrids combined represented 1 in 5 of all car registrations during the same period.

To honour World EV Day, Select sat down with Professor Ed Hawkins, Professor of climate science at the University of Reading, and Academic Lead for Public Engagement at the University’s Department of Meteorology.

Prof Hawkins - whose primary mode of transport is his bicycle - is as enthusiastic about EVs as we are.

And here, the respected academic shares his thoughts on the future of mobility, his involvement with Reading Football Club - of which Select Car Leasing is Principal Sponsor - and offers words of advice for climate sceptics:

In November 2020, the Government announced that all new petrol and diesel cars and vans will be phased-out by 2030. How do you see that deadline panning out?

Prof Hawkins: 

“For cars, we’re going down the electric route. And one of the positives we have is that the Government has legislated that there will be no more new petrol or diesel engines sold by 2030.

There may be hybrids for a couple of years after that point but, essentially, if you’re buying a new car in the late 2020s, you’re going to be buying electric. If you’re buying anything else you’re going to be left with a stranded asset.

There’s still a lot of work to do when it comes to charging points for EVs and efficiency. But the Government has set the direction of travel for car manufacturers, and that’s really helpful. To say, in advance, ‘This is where the industry is going - and you need to change’, is encouraging. It’s very rare for an industry to have such advanced knowledge.

And, of course, manufacturers and companies can respond to this. It’s what we need more of - the Government setting the direction of travel so that we can learn to do things differently.

The industry can now respond accordingly, as we know that they can. The solutions are available, they just need to be scaled-up. And as soon as things are set in motion to stop certain ways of doing things, alternatives come to the fore.

Overall, we need to live in a way that’s more sustainable. And we need society to support the difficult decisions that the Government needs to make.”

What about hydrogen-powered vehicles? Some manufacturers, such as BMW, are committed to developing hydrogen powertrains?

Prof Hawkins: 

“We may need hydrogen fuel for lorries - that may be part of the solution, but not the whole solution. And it has to be green hydrogen, not hydrogen generated from gas, which is not ideal.”

Professor Hawkins is the creator of the internationally-renowned climate ‘warming stripes’, a graphic visualisation showing the progressive heating of the planet going back almost two centuries.

Those warming stripes are now incorporated into the sleeves of the Reading F.C official kit - a move the club says is a ‘striking visual message in support of climate action’.

Select Car Leasing is also working behind the scenes to enhance Reading F.C’s green credentials, with plans underway to install a bank of electric vehicle rapid charging points at the Stadium itself.

So, Prof Hawkins, how did the conversation with Reading F.C about the warming stripes first come about?

Prof Hawkins: 

“The club has always been keen to improve its sustainability credentials and to do things in a more sustainable way. It’s something that will ultimately save them money but it’s also the right thing to do - and the right thing to talk about it.

The University has a lot of expertise in this area, from academic research to building design, and we’re always actively thinking about how to make our campus more sustainable.

So, it was a natural partnership for the club and the University to come together to talk about sustainability issues.

The Commercial Director at the club actually saw the Warming Stripes in the background of a Zoom chat that took place. It sparked this whole conversation. And the club took the brave decision to try something pretty dramatic, and to put the stripes on the kit to announce a new chapter in its sustainability journey.

The Stripes on the kit has had so much reaction, and kick-started so many conversations. It’s fantastic.

And we want to spark these conversations in different tribes. Having these conversations within groups is much more effective than a scientist or politician simply lecturing people. It’s about ordinary people having conversations with each other that normalise the things that people are doing, and need to do, in order to tackle all of these issues. That’s what we’re trying to inspire.”

We’ve just lived through a record-breaking heatwave - does that further highlight the importance of having these conversations about sustainability?

Prof Hawkins: 

“The recent heatwave highlights that as well as making the necessary changes to reduce our emissions, we also need to adapt. We need to live differently, or build a new infrastructure, to enable us to live in the new climate that we now have, and the climate we will live in in the future.

The summer heatwave was a pretty unusual event, even for modern times. But we will see more days where the temperature climbs above 40 degrees C. We’ll also see more 38s and 39s as well as warmer and wetter winters and more intense rainfall.

We all saw the implications of the extreme heat - for runaways, roads, railways, and wildfires - in a society where we haven’t yet adapted to those temperatures.

Other countries have lived with these temperatures for centuries and their infrastructures are designed to deal with them, with air conditioning, window shutters, and trees on the street to provide shade. They’re adapted, and we’re not, and that’s why these freak events can hit us much harder than in other places.

It’s about collectively moving outside our range of expectations.”

And what about those people who are still sceptical about the impact of climate change?

Prof Hawkins: 

“We’ve been dealing with this for decades in different forms. The big fossil fuel companies understood the science just as well as the academic scientists did back in the 1980s. They were doing their own analysis and they could see the issues. There are graphs from Exxon reports showing the predicted future rise in global temperatures and the future rise in carbon dioxide. And they’re remarkably accurate.

But instead of deciding what needed to be done to tackle climate change, there was a process of cover-up and misinformation. That’s why we’re in the place we are today.
I can understand people being frightened of change. But to tackle the issues society needs to change. It will mean changes to, for example, our diet, the way we travel, and how we heat our homes. And some of those changes may not be very comfortable for people to understand and appreciate.

But there are enormous opportunities. We will live in a world with less air pollution, for example, which we need to encourage, irrespective of any climate problem. And there are other enormous benefits if we walk and cycle more than use our cars. We’ll be healthier as a society and save the NHS money. We’ll have more energy security by focusing on renewable efforts in the UK, another huge benefit given the current situation globally.

We need to encourage those who are worried about the change and who like to dismiss the science because of that. This is the necessary cause of action that we must take.”

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