En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young says he in­tends to take a pol­i­cy to Cab­i­net in a few weeks time to pro­mote the use of elec­tric ve­hi­cles in this coun­try to try and help save the en­vi­ron­ment.

Young made the state­ment yes­ter­day as he de­liv­ered an ad­dress at the sign­ing of a mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing be­tween the Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Co Ltd (SWM­COL) and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) to cap­ture and utilise the methane gas emit­ted by the For­res Park land­fill.

He said such an agree­ment was “long over­due” and urged the two State agen­cies to move be­yond an MOU to a more sus­tain­able project as the time for talk has passed.

Young said right now the world is deal­ing with the ef­fects of not do­ing enough to save the plan­et.

And he said the goal is to try to cor­rect that.

“I pledge the com­mit­ment of the min­istry of en­er­gy and en­er­gy in­dus­tries for us to get be­hind this move­ment of mov­ing to­wards low­er car­bon, to car­bon neu­tral­i­ty, to the cap­ture of things like methane and to the use of re­new­able en­er­gy sources,” Young said.

“I am hop­ing to go to Cab­i­net in the next cou­ple weeks, with a pol­i­cy try­ing to per­suade my cab­i­net col­leagues, and I don’t think I will have much dif­fi­cul­ty, for us to adopt an elec­tric ve­hi­cles pol­i­cy be­cause I think the time for that tran­si­tion is up­on us and we need to move in that di­rec­tion,” he said.

Young said the part­ner­ship be­tween SWM­COL and NGC is es­sen­tial for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions.

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les said the part­ner­ship be­tween SWM­COL and NGC has many ben­e­fits in­clud­ing a re­duc­tion in green­house gas­es emis­sions and rev­enue gen­er­a­tion.

“I ref­er­ence a cou­ple weeks ago that SWM­COL, the trans­fers and sub­si­dies to that state agency it hov­ers some­where in the re­gion of $100 mil­lion on an an­nu­al ba­sis,” Gon­za­les said.

Gon­za­les added that the ini­tia­tive is a prime ex­am­ple of the gov­ern­ment’s strat­e­gy to achieve eco­nom­ic and en­vi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty by pro­mot­ing the “cir­cu­lar econ­o­my.”

“In this case, that goal will be re­alised by util­is­ing the gas emit­ted by the waste in our land­fills, to pro­duced a val­ued prod­uct,” he said.

Apart from Young and Gon­za­les the sign­ing of the MOU was at­tend­ed by NGC’s chair­man Con­rad Enill and SWM­COL chair­man Ronald Mil­ford.