My plan for young people

I have been reading 39 Ways To Save The Planet by the BBC journalist Tom Heap, which includes such ingenious suggestions as capturing refrigerant gases in a large box and then destroying the large box. It is an interesting book. I would like to suggest to Tom a 40th way in which we might help to save the planet, as well as saving the country a lot of money: raise the minimum age at which a person can drive a car from 17 years to 25 years. This would immediately reduce our motor vehicle emissions by a little over 5 per cent — no small contribution. It would also reduce the number of accidents on our roads by 18 per cent, consequently saving the taxpayer an estimated £2.9 billion per year, which we could spend on planting trees or building attractive igloos for polar bears.

That is by no means the end of the benefits, environmental or otherwise, of my policy.