Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions • Hacker News Board

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#201

Post by dazc » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:09 AM UTC

perfunctory wrote: post #93

barnacled wrote: post #68

This is utterly ridiculous. I live in the UK and have been renting for many years, I've lived at 15+ addresses and not at a single one could I have powered the car from home. Not one. The UK is small, cars are squeezed onto tiny roads and most people do on-street parking, i.e. you park where you can. When I last had a car I could only park around the corner from my flat (which was set far back from the road). Having…

> This is utterly ridiculous. I live in the UK and have been renting for many years, I've lived at 15+ addresses and not at a single one could I have powered the car from home. Not one. Oh boy. I just picture someone from the early 20th century riding a horse and complaining about not being able to tank a car for the lack of gas stations.

But you don't have to charge the car from your house, just as you don't need to have your own personal petrol pump.

So rather than being utterly ridiculous, it just requires a different mindset and acceptance that many more charging points will be available in the next ten years than there are currently.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#202

Post by dariosalvi78 » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:10 AM UTC

xendo wrote: post #26

dariosalvi78 wrote: post #6

this should have been done 10 years ago, but anyway, it's a good move. Waiting to see the EU doing the same.

i don't follow the space closely, but from my brief research it seems that 10 years ago there were almost no alternatives to petrol cars. On what premise do you think it would've been reasonable to ban petrol cars in that situation?

well, electric cars were invented in the late 1800, so it's a matter of market more than technology. If we had this policy launched 10 years ago the market would have been way different now.

Even considering the same market offers as we have had without the policy: hybrid cars exist since late 90s and the first fully electric cars were already available 10 years ago. It could have been done.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#203

Post by feralimal » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:11 AM UTC

jonp888 wrote: post #187

feralimal wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for those posting data from NASA and NOAA. I know you will think that I'm being outrageous not to trust the data from those organisations, but I don't. I see all - ALL - the organisations as acting in interests that are not mine. I do not want to get into an anarchy conversation, but I think it is self-evident that governmental structures are about control. What is requested in posting this 'scientific' data,…

You seem to expect that rising Carbon Dioxide means people will suffocate, and if they haven't, then "Gotcha! It's all made up", but it doesn't work like that. You will never, ever see the water level rise in a way that is directly visible. The effect is more frequent flooding. I personally, have noticed a change in the climate. When I was a child, the river used to freeze in the winter and there would be metres of s…

No I don't think it means people will suffocate. I'm saying that carbon dioxide should help trees grow. That we have a natural buffer against too much.

Did you know that some farms, pump carbon dioxide into their greenhouses to improve their crop. It seems self-evident that any extra would be mopped up by trees, bushes etc in the wild.

I hear what you are saying about snow and your experience. But you should also ask the older generation what their experience was of the winters there. There may have been times that there wasn't always snow. And unfortunately, I don't think our weather today is entirely natural - that weather modification has been around for a few years now.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#204

Post by dzhiurgis » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:12 AM UTC

input_sh wrote: post #169

smilekzs wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> odd/even rule for license plates Friendly reminder that Beijing has been implementing exactly that, then later a variant of that, since 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_space_rationing_in_Beijin...

Friendly reminder that measures like this unevenly affect people in different social classes, because those who are well-off can just buy two cars and be completely unaffected.

I'm not sure it's so easy to buy second car in Beijing. Anything is possible if you are very rich, but that doesn't matter if there's a 1% more cars instead of 50%.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#205

Post by forest_dweller » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:14 AM UTC

Jetrel wrote: post #60

physicsguy wrote: post #31

Many, many houses do not have anything other than on-street parking here. Since 2012 I've lived in 5 houses, and three of them had no driveway. I'm currently buying a house which has no drive way, with no way of fitting one. Apparently 1/3 houses have only on street parking. Unless they also provide huge, huge grants to rapidly implement dense onstreet charging, and fast, this is a pipedream and will end up getting p…

I mean, with new teslas, their range is similar enough to gas cars that you only need to charge them about once a week, if that. And they charge fast enough that it's not terribly dissimilar from hitting the gas station, which currently is perhaps a 10 minute affair for gas. Bumping that to ~20min isn't a dealbreaker. It's feasible, if a little bit annoying, to have a refueling story for them that's similar to that o…

How much is a Tesla? Many tens of thousands of pounds. They have to be a lot cheaper or I am just going to buy another second hand car and just use it as a donour car for my existing vehicle.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#206

Post by mytailorisrich » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:15 AM UTC

CaptArmchair wrote: post #194

echelon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Start by implementing a odd/even rule for license plates in big cities, even full bans on weekends. > - Tax and/or de-subsidize the meat industry. And just like that, you've been voted straight out of office. Better luck next life connecting to the electorate. You can't do those things. Humanity is a distributed consensus problem. Climate change presents an interesting change in the fitness landscape topology ahe…

Of course you can't do them storming straight out of the gates. It just doesn't work like that. But sure, you can do them perfectly. How? - You provide incentives for attractive alternatives. - You invest in those alternatives and you invest in contextual drivers that make the transition more appealing. For instance, you provide an integrated plans for urban planning that cover different concerns. - You emphasize the…

People used to eat little meat, not because of a "traditional" or "localized" way of living but because they were too poor to afford it.

As soon as they got richer they could do what they dreamed of.

It's like cars, really. People used to walk. Not because it was nice and healthy but because they had no choice. Then bikes and public transport werean improvement, but really people do prefer the comfort and freedom of driving their own cars and when that became possible and affordable they did not need much convincing to jump at the opportunity.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#207

Post by CraigJPerry » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:15 AM UTC

barnacled wrote: post #165

CraigJPerry wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Firstly - any response to climate change that does not include China and really India Are these not mostly proxy emissions for western countries? E.g. is it the case that people in these countries are emitting pollution due to their lifestyles, or is the pollution mostly from energy, transport and manufacturing in the pursuit of selling products to western countries? >> During the covid19 situation we've seen the…

>Are these not mostly proxy emissions for western countries? E.g. is it the case that people in these countries are emitting pollution due to their lifestyles, or is the pollution mostly from energy, transport and manufacturing in the pursuit of selling products to western countries? Good point but I think much of it could also be attributed to countries going through their own industrialisation processes and generat…

>> but I think much of it could also be attributed to countries going through their own industrialisation processes

Is that not just a misconception about how countries develop though?

See Andrew McAfee - More from Less.

E.g. we know that as a country’s manufacturing capability matures, it produces more product with less raw material and energy inputs. It’s somewhat counter intuitive though but the end result is the opposite of what you suggest - maturation of industry reduces emissions and reduces raw material consumption and it can be to such an extent that the amount of product produced increases- example, motor industry of America or Japan, example battery production industry of china. Raw material consumption and energy use went down, manufactured product went up. Andrew McAfee’s book has better examples than mine but these were the ones i looked into to try to disprove his argument.

>> The big issue in China is the CCP have no reason to care or abide by any global rules on this

Wait, the US emissions of co2 per capita is just over 16tonnes per year. Why is China who’s per capita emissions at just under 7tonnes per year the key to moving forward? The key is america but the political approach is always to use the metric of convenience- currently that is absolute volume since that paints china worse than the US, and yet it would be only fair that we adjust for population.

>> There's a strong correlation between economic strife and deaths

Sure, but can we quantify it? We need to figure out if we’re over-prioritising covid response. E.g. if there were 1mm excess deaths and only 25% were attributable to covid, that sounds like the cure is worse than the disease.

As it stands though, it appears almost 100% of excess deaths are attributable to covid, that suggests we need to keep focussing on preventing covid deaths rather than focussing on death ultimately caused by economic harm, correct?

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#208

Post by Mvandenbergh » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:18 AM UTC

barnacled wrote: post #68

This is utterly ridiculous. I live in the UK and have been renting for many years, I've lived at 15+ addresses and not at a single one could I have powered the car from home. Not one. The UK is small, cars are squeezed onto tiny roads and most people do on-street parking, i.e. you park where you can. When I last had a car I could only park around the corner from my flat (which was set far back from the road). Having…

Two thirds of UK car-owners have off-street parking so it simply isn't true that "most people do on-street parking" on a national level. In London, sure it's much rarer. You point out that public transport is bad outside of London. Certainly true but it is also the case that we are then left only with the problem of places that have poor public transport and very little off-street parking as the most problematic areas. That's quite a step down from needing a charger at every parking spot.

The real meat of this is the additional £1.3bn of funding for on-street charging. That is enough for hundreds of thousands of simple Ubitricity style lamp-post chargers which will go a long way since private companies are also installing chargers on concession contracts with local authorities and at shopping centre car parks and other convenience charging location. I don't doubt that further charging funding will be required.

It is true that fast and rapid charger roll-out requires reinforcement of the electrical distribution infrastructure which makes them substantially more expensive to install but that is because they are both high current and "must run" - when you plug into one you want it to charge your vehicle immediately as fast as possible, not decide to wait until 2AM. Most on-street chargers on residential streets will be for slow, overnight charging which can be co-ordinated to do the bulk of their charging during the low-load overnight period.

Then there is the timing: this is a ban on new sales from 2030 which means that there will be substantial petrol and diesel cars on the road until late into the 2030s. New hybrids are not banned until 2035 in the current plan. So even properties that are still not near a charging point by 2035 will still have access to brand new hybrids and five year old ICE vehicles.

The current share of electric cars as part of new vehicle sales is 8% already and without this intervention probably would have reached more than two thirds anyway, the whole point is to signal that this is coming well ahead of time to accelerate that transition.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#209

Post by feralimal » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:19 AM UTC

acallaghan wrote: post #175

feralimal wrote: post #119

Where is the climate emergency? Can someone show me something I can see? Sea levels haven't risen. There are more small birds around where I live than when I was younger. Things seem to be doing ok. I am a skeptic and I'm very far from trusting experts. I don't want to be in a state of belief, I want to know. But I am put in a position that I must take it on trust that it is real. Is carbon dioxide bad? Surely, it wo…

Climate change and coronavirus isn't some masterplan created just to incovenience you . You're a person out of 7 billion other people on this planet, our collective actions have consequences. You can't see your cells, smell or see carbon monoxide, or touch the other planets - yet you trust that you have red blood cells, CO gas kills you in your sleep, and that mars is made from rock. You've been told this as well by…

Climate change and coronavirus are pretexts for the rollout of a technocratic system. They are geopolitical stories to get our buy in to all they have planned for us. This can be seen in the way all our governments are acting in tandem. We have a 'new normal', 'build back better', etc. Klaus Schwab lays out the plans in detail if you want to know what's coming up.

What happened to 3 weeks to flatten the curve? We're 8 months in, and it is clear this is going to continue perpetually, and we are going to be vaccinated twice annually for covid19/20/21 - there is no end to this. And climate change is the 'carrot' - we all want to save the earth! But what if that is a fake story to frame our situation in order for us to subscribe to the plans?

If you try to correlate climate change to personal experience, you will see just how much you are putting trust in organisations that are not there to serve you.

Re: Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions

#210

Post by tialaramex » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 10:20 AM UTC

JimDabell wrote: post #113

LatteLazy wrote: post #30

This perfectly epitomises the uk (and the rest of the worlds) attitude to global warming: * it's a non binding commitment to do something but not for at least a decade * it's not enough even if it does happen * it will be too late by then (it probably already is for anything but drastic action) * it's totally at the whim of future governments who will be no more willing to spend the money/time/popularity than the cur…

I think you’re being a bit unfair here. The UK has made good progress in moving away from fossil fuels in recent years. As of June this year, the UK was generating more power from renewables than from fossil fuels. A decade ago hardly any power was being generated from renewables. The UK has gone months without burning coal this year, and plans to decommission the last three coal power plants in the next five years.…

One of the things in these proposals that isn't as eye-catching as "ban petrol cars" was investment and subsidies to get to 4x wind power generation.

Right now it's windy and the UK gets about 10GW of electricity from wind turbines (maybe a bit more) the past few days. But at 4x that would be 40GW of electricity, which would actually be enough to just power the whole country on a typical weekday evening (as the sun goes down, day time place of work usage isn't all stopped yet but home usage is picking up).

Now, obviously it isn't always windy, but on the other hand it also isn't always a weekday evening. At 3am on a Sunday in June the country is ticking over at 20GW, and the weather doesn't care so your wind turbines might be kicking out 40GW anyway. We need to store or export that. That's a key challenge for the next decade.