Road planners accused of rigging carbon emissions rules

Environmentalists have said that the Department for Transport has under-counted CO2 from its road improvement programme to disguise the climate impact of new roads.

The government currently measures emissions against national CO2 targets, whilst measuring benefits of a new road against the local economy - something which the Treasury has assured is a perfectly reasonable approach.

However, critics say that the resulting calculation exaggerates the benefits of new roads, whilst downgrading the negatives in terms of carbon emissions.

Speaking to the BBC, Chris Todd, director of pressure group Transport Action Network, said that the measure proved that the government has one rule for its £27 billion road-building programme, and another rule for everything else.

He said: “This is like someone who's morbidly obese insisting they can gorge on another cream cake, because no single cake will have a 'material impact' on their well-being.”

A recent consultants’ report projected that the government’s roads programme will increase carbon emissions from the strategic road network by about 20 MtCO2, when they need to go down by about 167 MtCO2 to meet carbon targets.

The government insists that the advent of electric cars will solve the CO2 problem on the roads.