There are several paths that I could pursue this afternoon. The comments that Llyr Gruffydd made about the economic opportunities that would come from developing green industries and investing in retrofitting energy saving equipment in homes, and so on, is something that appeals to me, and is something that I spoke about when I had the economic role in the previous Assembly, but what I want to focus on, if I may, is transport specifically.

The climate change committee at the Assembly said recently that the Welsh Government faces a specific challenge here that stems from a number of major emitters of carbon dioxide in Wales. According to the committee: 

'There is therefore a need to maximise the impact of interventions to reduce emissions in other areas, such as transport'.

And it also mentions housing. That is, getting to grips with transport emissions is something that we can do here in the devolved world that we have, so we need to ensure that we push this to the maximum in terms of the potential that we have before us. Transport in 2014 accounted for 12.77 per cent of the total emissions in Wales, but over 21 per cent of the emissions within devolved competence. That is, the things that we can do something about, and transport is one of those things.

A report from the Institute of Welsh Affairs on decarbonisation of transport in Wales states that Wales is more dependent on the car than any other nation or region in the United Kingdom. That states clearly that we do have to do something about this and we do have to seek that modal change. We do talk a lot about it, but we are not making enough progress on it in terms of getting to grips with the problem that we are trying to tackle—in the most fundamental way, getting people out of their cars and onto their bikes or on foot. We have an active travel Act, but we’re not seeing the investment going in to support that legislation that we should be seeing. We see that around £10 per head per year is spent by the Welsh Government on active transport, whereas the Assembly’s economy committee has recommended expenditure between £17 and £20 per annum. Yes, people need to be persuaded to change their own culture in terms of the way that they travel from A to B, but let us give them that nudge through investing in infrastructure that makes that so much easier. We only have to look at the new Nextbike system in Cardiff. There’s been investment that’s gone into that and people are using those bikes, and I’m one of them. There is a sense here in Cardiff that there is a genuine feeling of change towards active travel and this needs to happen across Wales, not just in our capital city.

And we do have to move people onto the buses. The same report that I referred to earlier by the Institute of Wales Affairs states that bus services in Wales have been in significant decline over the long term. We do have to overturn that trend. We know where we need to invest in the railways. It’s of course a great disappointment that the UK Government hasn't invested and has only invested in electrification in the south. It’s appalling that electrification in the north isn’t on the agenda at all. We should be talking seriously, all of us, as we are doing in Plaid Cymru, about making that rail connection along the west of Wales—not just from Carmarthen to Aberystwyth, but from Aberystwyth through to Bangor. Yes, we need to open the railway across Anglesey. These projects are all there, we just need the ambition to pursue them. We were talking about this in questions earlier on: if you consider the £100 billion that’s being spent on HS2 in England, just imagine what we could do with a very small proportion of that total.

I’ll refer quickly to the M4. We agree that it would be a waste and would actually attract people to use their cars more. That’s what the black route would do. Yes, we do need a solution for the south-east, but we need to be clever and smarter in the way that we tackle that puzzle around the Brynglas tunnels.