Green Notebook in front of a Christmas Tree

The other day, it being wonderfully quiet in my world, I tried to figure out whether having a Christmas tree was a good idea for the world. Despite being involved in that nasty Formula 1 business, I do think about such things – and I will happily fight any environmentalist who suggests that the sport is bad for the human race. It is an easy target, of course, because everyone says cars are bad. But then, using that argument, so are cows, because they fart and belch so much methane out into the atmosphere that we should stop eating them and thus we would not need so many. Although I read somewhere that if we feed them seaweed, methane emissions could reduce dramatically so we don’t all need to become vegetarians.

I ended up with no sensible conclusion relating to Christmas trees, although there were all kinds of stories saying that it is disgraceful to have a Christmas tree, to eat turkey and to wrap presents. You name it, everything we do at Christmas is bad. Disgraceful. Mind you, religious folk and the shop-owners would all be very upset if we stopped having Christmas, wouldn’t they? And, frankly, so would I, because without the Christmas break, Stefano and his gang would start scheduling Grands Prix in December and January, on the basis that Formula 1 used to do that in the old days… (and because it would help the share price). A break is needed from time to time.

In the end, I strayed off the original subject (as you do) and found myself looking up a different question: why do we even have Christmas trees? That was a lot more interesting.

The thing is that in the short days of the midwinter, when night falls in the middle of the afternoon, humans get rather depressed. The midwinter reaches its nadir on December 21, the winter solstice, after which the days start getting longer again. Back in pagan times, during the darkest days, they used to put evergreen plants that bore “fruit” in the winter (holly, ivy, mistletoe etc) in the houses, to get a bit of colour and to remind themselves that happier times were ahead. These were the signs that life would be renewed… and that there were better times ahead. I guess it is a bit like all the F1 review programmes one gets at Christmas, which remind us that motor racing will start again when the winter is over.

Various nations claim to have invented Christmas trees. In Riga, Latvia, there is even a stone monument which declares that it is the site of the first public Christmas tree. But there is disagreement. The Romans, for example, used fir trees to decorate their temples for Saturnalia, but by definition these were not Christmas trees. The Germans had the paradeisbaum, but this related to a different festival, the feast of Adam and Eve, which they celebrated with mystery plays (the mystery, presumably, being how Cain and Abel had children without sleeping with their sisters). A glittery tree was used to distract attention away from this troubling conundrum.

Anyway, the good news for the British anti-Christmas tree folk is that they can do their favourite thing and blame the Germans because decorating Christmas trees in the sense we know it today started in Saxony where, legend has it, the troublesome priest (read disrupter if you are a millennial person) Martin Luther caused all sorts of upheaval by marrying a runaway nun and leading a movement that protested against the way the Catholic church did things. These protestants wanted new things and not all the bells and smells. But they all disagreed and so fragmented into different churches. During this process Luther was inspired, one day in 1536, to invent Christmas decorations, when walking through a pine forest near Wittenberg and seeing the starry night sky through the branches of some fir trees. So, not caring much about the environment, he cut a small one down, took it home, put candles in it and… voila! It soon caught on, although thousands have died over the years because their candles set fire to their trees/houses/bodies.

In grumpy Britain, Oliver Cromwell complained about the “heathen traditions” of decorated trees, because he thought Christmas was supposed to be a solemn event… (Give that man a drink…)

Scrolling quickly on through history we meet more Germanic influence in the person of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of George III, who introduced the Christmas tree to England. Later Queen Victoria made Prince Albert happy with Christmas trees and the idea became popular when a sketch appeared in the Illustrated London News (left), after which everyone wanted a tree at Christmas… She was a great social influencer. These days, 300 million Christmas trees are chopped down each year, although as it takes between six and 10 years to grow each one, this means a lot of carbon dioxide is absorbed before the trees are needlessly felled. Having said that, studies show that artificial Christmas trees must be used for 12 years before the emissions required to produce them match the emissions created by growing and supplying real trees…

I have to admit that I’m an artificial Christmas tree person because the tree always looks good, there are no annoying pine needles and you don’t have to find a way to get rid of the whole thing after the holidays are over. After Twelfth Night, you just pack it away and get on with life, waiting for the 12th year, after which one can feel virtuous as well…

I had similar thoughts during the New Year celebrations when I watched cities all over the world having firework displays. Paris, I read, blew up a third of a ton of explosives to celebrate the start of 2023. People fly off to foreign parts to see the New Year in Sydney or New York, while others fly in to watch the action in London or Paris. This year, so the authorities claimed, Paris attracted a crowd of a million, right down the Champs-Élysées, to celebrate the first fireworks for two years. It looked quite impressive. Normally the number is about a quarter of that. But how can this be good for the world? All these people had to get there somehow… by cars, planes and trains. I doubt many came by bicycle or riding horses.

Blowing things up to make pretty lights in the sky and pumping out massive emissions is deemed to be acceptable by Paris’s mayor, Annie Hildalgo, although she will not consider the idea of having a Grand Prix in Paris. Formula E was deemed to be OK, because Alejandro Agag and Jean Todt told her that the cars were green, although they may not have mentioned the diesel generators that I saw being used to power the batteries when I visited that first race. Anyway, Ms Hidalgo has been hoping to turn Paris into a New Age Garden of Eden by driving away cars, not literally (you get arrested for that), but rather by closing down access, creating daft one way systems, carefully phasing traffic lights to delay everything and all the other stuff that leads to driver insanity. I presume that she does this to save the planet but also in the hope that one day she will be able to ride her bicycle into the Elysees Palace as President (the title is an office or position and does not specify gender). She tried in 2022 and the result was a catastrophic 1.7 percent of the vote in the first round, which means that she probably won’t get a second chance.

Formula E left Paris pretty quickly (as it does in quite a few cities) but the French Grand Prix, which needs to be in a big city, is now dying. This is a shame. In part because it is now my home race and in part because the country is key in the history of the sport and the automobile industry. The words “Grand Prix” and “automobile” are French.

Just before Christmas there was a meeting to dissolve the F1 promoter, known as GIP Grand Prix de France, but this was delayed because they need to figure out who is going to settle €27 million of debts. This will be shared between various local and regional bodies in the south, but the race gave the region a huge economic benefit in the course of its recent life, although no-one ever seems to take these things not account.

The problem that F1 has with governments is that people never really seem to explain to the politicians (or they don’t want to hear the explanation) about just how important hybrid cars are for the next 30-odd years and how incredible the progress made by F1 in terms of hybrid technology has been. The politicians vote through stuff that looks right, in the knowledge that they will no longer be around when things don’t work out. Banning the sale of all non-electric new cars in the European Union in 2035, a policy agreed last year, was surprising, and now the industry and academics are pushing back, arguing that the implications of this will be disastrous. The new rule does not mean that all cars have to be electric in 2035, but rather that one can no longer sell new hybrids.

Right now, the average life of a car is 15 years and so, the argument goes, the hybrids and traditional internal combustion engine cars will all be gone by 2050 and by then the technology will exist to produce and maintain electric cars at reasonable prices. The industry says no.

Things have changed quite a lot recently (which gives the EU politician a useful loophole) because of the economic troubles that have followed COVID and the war in Ukraine. Electricity prices have gone crazy, which means that electric cars are no longer as cost-efficient as petrol cars, not that there are sufficient power stations to create the power needed.

The price of batteries is not coming down because of the vast hike in the prices of the exotic metals needed. Lithium, for example, now costs around 10 times what it did two years ago. The prices of nickel, cobalt, copper and other similar metals have all increased significantly as well. And that means electric car prices have gone up accordingly. The car companies are warning that if the law remains unchanged the industry in Europe will become uncompetitive compared to the Chinese, jobs will be lost and whole sectors of society will not be able to afford new cars.

You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to see that between now and 2035 there will likely be companies buying and stockpiling hybrid cars, which will be sold as secondhand cars after 2035 at a big profit. In addition, people who do not trust electric cars will go on driving their current cars for longer, which means that the roads will be filled with not very efficient old cars for many years to come.

Back in October Carlos Tavares, the boss of Stellantis, said that it was essential for the ban to be altered to allow hybrid cars to be sold as a transitional solution on the path to full electric cars.

“The dogmatic decision that was taken to ban the sale of thermal vehicles in 2035 has social consequences that are not manageable,” he said.

More recently Toyota President Akio Toyoda said the auto industry’s silent majority is now starting to question the whole future of electric vehicles because they will price average earners out of the market. The numbers are not adding up. Saying anything that goes against the current is, of course, condemned by the green folk.

In the circumstances, I would guess that there will have to be some compromise, with the likelihood being that the ban will be diluted to allow full hybrids to be sold for a number of years more, which would give the industry time to find solutions for cost-effective emission-free transportation. In the meantime, governments need to invest more in public transportation, to help convince people to get off the roads. Reviving old train routes is a good start, particularly in country areas, where electric cars will not be much use.

This is important stuff for the sport because having a bunch of bankrupt car companies is not going to help…

In the end, F1 will stay with its super-efficient hybrid engines from 2026 onwards, with synthetic fuels being developed to help reduce the impact. Races will switch more and more to urban areas with public transportation, in order to cut down on emissions, in pursuit of carbon neutrality. There was a brilliant argument the other day from Alejandro Soberon, the promoter of the Mexican Grand Prix, who said that while F1’s biggest problem has always been the impact of how the fans get to and from events, one can argue that perhaps the sport is already carbon neutral if one takes into account not the people attending events, but rather those who are NOT going out and staying at home to watch Grands Prix.

If one can calculate the emissions NOT created because of the TV viewers at home, it is easy to see how this might be used to present a serious claim that F1 is already emission-free. As I said, in reference to Christmas trees, there are lots of different arguments.

In any case, after 2031 F1 can change its rules if it believes it is out of sync with the world, although the chances are that the next major change may not come until 2035.

Anyway, back to the Christmas tree…