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

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321–330 of 352 posts

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

#321
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps we should stop letting individuals appropriate public space for storage of their private property Are you arguing for getting rid of apartments?

Not at all! I just think yop've no more right to store your car on the public street than you do a hot tub, piano, etc.

Well in practice you have a right usually to park your car on the street but not your hot tub because that's how things were designed and worked for decades and it's not going to change in a hurry. The public streets are controlled via the government by the public and they are mostly ok with it.

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

#322
post #217
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> political processes have not allowed those signals to reach "the economy" This right here is the achilles heal of free market theory.

the market can and will correct itself. there are two problems however: - actually getting rules implemented and enforced (political suicide by regulators - had an example of that in my own country just a couple months ago, made a mess in the government, the new rules didn't pass in parliament, governing party lost 10 pp in polls anyway) - very irregular period of convergence from old rules to new (societal turmoil g…

Sounds like no true Scotsman

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

#323
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are way off. It took about 15 years to go from cities dominated by horse carriages to them being dominated by cars. It took longer in agriculture and rural areas. But the shift to electrical vehicles is trivial in comparison. Technically and economically we could easily prohibit new fossil fuelled cars by 2025. Sun and wind power is already much cheaper to install than coal powered plants, and once sun and wind p…

Cities went from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles because the incentives made it attractive to do it. The same can be done for for electric vehicles, it’s just a matter of putting the horse in front of the cart.

And the incentives are there. Electric cars are quiet, clean, and much cheaper to drive and to maintain.

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing did need to change, but since we've decided that we want no part of the single market or any regulatory alignment things will have to change unless we decide otherwise. Because of our own foolishness for 4 years, we have created a deadline for ourselves.

Maybe my point wasn’t clear. Very little will change (in the short term at least), the “deadline” is a misnomer, and whichever day finally becomes the real leaving day (as it’s been and no doubt will continue to be stretched out and kicked down the road) everyone will wake up and notice it’s much the same as any other, the histrionic cries coming from Twitter users notwithstanding. As to “nothing did need to change”…

No- the UK enters a WTO agreement on the 1st jan, that means imports taxes, duties and restrictions on a whole bunch of things. It’s impossible to plan for because it can all change at the last minute.

It’s easy to say nothing will change if it doesn’t affect you. I don’t understand why a trade agreement with a few extra bits of international legislation was put to a general public referendum. It’s got nothing to do with the average joe on the street, the general public has no understanding of this.

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

#325
Countries which are no longer major automotive manufacturers can afford to accelerate the transition. Basically, they can just import different cars. The countries where automotive lobby is still influential, will have to adjust the transition period to keep their ICE industry happy.

As for the charging infrastructure, I think it's easier to solve. It's not much more complicated than laying optical fiber everywhere. A massive undertaking, without doubt, but the revenue potential of the public charging is enormous. It's like building a network of gas stations, but without having to move fuel ever again.

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people get a measly 2 days of leisure time per week and you want to ban them from being able to use cars/leave the city on their 2 free days? Good luck I guess?

Why should leisure time require a car?

Because leisure time often coincides with outdoor activities and traveling to other places. The experience is much nicer when you're outside of your city. And even in Europe there're many places to visit which don't have train stations.

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

#327
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative? Destroy all petrol and diesel cars in 2029? If they didn't allow a transition period then it wouldn't go well.

Mandate a switch to e-fuels. Start with "all fossil-based fuels need to add 1% of synthetic e-fuels next year" and increase it to 100% over time. You can still drive your ICE car, but it'll become expensive.

How do synthetic fuels solve the CO2 problem?

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

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then humanity is clearly headed off a cliff in that landscape. Which, by the way, has been signaled to everyone for decades now. Just our political processes have not allowed those signals to reach "the economy" and we seem to be unable to act on anything that isn't felt by the economy. Which, I might add, is not a god-given fact, but rather a political choice. Anyway, we will have a cliff. And it will have been anno…

> Which, by the way, has been signaled to everyone for decades now. That's part of the problem. The general public have been hearing it for decades now, and are probably just sick and tired of hearing about it. As far back as I can remember, it's been nothing but "Nuclear weapons are gonna kill us all" "Acid rain is gonna kill us all!" "Smog is gonna kill us all!" "Drugs and crime are gonna kill us all" "The ozone ho…

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the diagnosis of "crisis fatigue" but for the examples you give, here's a breakdown by my own very biased view. I'm leaving out Acid Rain because I never really was part of that discourse (too young) and didn't read about it after the fact either.

These four (IMHO) do actually pose clear and present dangers to human health & wellbeing at scale:

* Nuclear Weapons

* Smog

* Ozone

* Global Warming / Climate Change

They were identified as risks and (except for Ozone, which was actually tackled and is improving to my knowlege) continue to be shown as risks. Or rather, by now, as actually doing harm.

On the other hand, these two here were never the big catastrophes that they were made out to be, yet were (and are!) continually overblown.

* Drugs & Crime

* Terrorism

Neither of them ever had the existential threat potential that the other group had. Not-so-incidentally, the proposed "solutions" to these problems were always...

* highly profitable for certain industries

* useful for conservative re-elections

* based in little to no fact

* often (predictably) counter-productive.

Bottom line: if we had actually put time and money into existing, working solutions to measurable, actual problems, we would have been perfectly capable to do so. We did it for Ozone, we could have done it again. We didn't.

Instead, we put countless dollars and lives into "solving" problems that were pretty much caused by their "solutions", and mostly because that was in the best interest of very few people.

If people are tired of anything, I hope/suspect that they are tired of a political/economic system that predictably ended up producing this mess.

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

#329
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this specific issue, what more could be done, really? Bring the ban to 2025? 2022? One can't simply expect mass production to switch that fast. UK has already tightened emissions rules on vehicles and VED taxes more polluting cars more heavily. They could, and probably will, ratchet things more. The right response on this policy is to say: great thanks Boris, you can clearly see the potential in green tech, now co…

The only thing that has a chance of working is thinking about it a bit differently - governments should heavily subsidize building solar energy plants. On the scale of "much more than we need". Then they should also heavily subsidize carbon capture and possibly also tech to turn it into liquid fuels again. Getting petrol cars off the road is just not going to happen on the time scale it's needed. If the 10 years unti…

They're building one of the biggest solar farms in Europe just down the road from me. The local Green party campaigned against it, on environmental grounds. Really, it seems like it's impossible to please the environmental lobby. As much as I want this stuff to happen I can imagine a politician thinking, "screw them, they'll only whinge anyway."

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, everything is not fine in Norway. Norway invested a lot on Tesla and to help their investment, they removed taxes and tolls on EVs. Most of Norway's electricity comes from hydropower and they have been building wind farms lately. Meanwhile, Norway's entire economy basically relies on selling crude oil. So, it has been "donating" a lot to anti-oil interests in the U.S. so that the oil prices remain high enough for…

The VAT has been removed in 2001, the tolls in 1997. Tesla has been created in 2003, but they didn't sell much in Norway until 2013. https://elbil.no/english/norwegian-ev-policy/ No one will deny that Norway's wealth is related to the oil industry, but no Norway is not relying on selling crude oil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Norway I don't know about the funding's of anti-oil interests in the US, do you…

>I don't know about the funding's of anti-oil interests in the US, do you mean they are not funding competitors but companies that may benefit Norway ?

No, they fund politicians and lobbies. For example, they funded the Clinton Foundation to buy political favors... which they cut significantly after Clinton lost the 2016 election. The idea was to get the Democrats to push back on fracking, so that the Norwegian oil remains relevant for a longer time.

https://www.thelocal.no/20160704/norways-funding-of-clinton-...

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