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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

As a Norwegian who just replaced a diesel car with an electric car, there are a few factors which is making EVs very attractive here:

- EVs are VAT (25%) exempt, and in addition avoid the extra duty due to no CO2 or NOX emissions. As an example a VW Golf 1.0 115HP TSI[1] gasoline version is about 37.5k USD from dealer. Without VAT or emission duties[2], that Golf would be about 23k USD, where 8.4k USD is the emission duties.

- Many people have a relatively short commute, so limited range EVs like Nissan Leaf or e-Golf do just fine.

- A lot of our roads, especially in cities, have road toll. EVs have for many years been exempt. Recently this changed, but EVs still only pays 50% of regular cars.

[1]: https://www.volkswagen.no/content/dam/vw-ngw/vw_pkw/importer... [2]: https://www.skatteetaten.no/person/avgifter/bil/importere/re...

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Which really means, if we invest in government subsidies for EVs, people will understand the real costs to the petroleum infrastructure (for those of you playing along at home - the petroleum industry gets billions in tax subsidies yearly already, so this would be a leveling of the playing field).

The problem is a political/governance one.

Don't forget the environment subsidizing the entire fossil fuel industry- that is a bill whose payments are now behind and with a lot of interest that will be passed on to everything on the planet instead of just those responsible for the negative consequences.

That doesn't even sound that bad until you realize that the payments balloon and defaulting means extinction.

That's a little melodramatic. I just got back from Sweden and Norway and as others have noted the lavish subsidies make the extra expense of running an EV attractive. I was talking to a Swedish friend who follows climate scientist Piers Corbyn (the UK Labour party leader's brother) closely, and who wouldn't agree with your perception. https://twitter.com/piers_corbyn EV's are very cost effective for now to seed the market, but once the subsidies are turned off it is questionable haw many thrifty Scandinavians will continue if there are more economically viable option open to them.

No it doesn't. Certain species may go extinct, but almost certainly not humans.

Our ape ancestors evolved in an environment where temperatures were far higher than today. In fact, we're in a cool phase, as far as the global climate is concerned.

Sure, absolutely. I don't think humans will go fully extinct. But it doesn't make me any less scared for the future. In short term - massive waves of immigrants coming to Europe because their own regions will have difficulty growing anything and having enough drinkable water. A million refugees has severely damaged the very principles of the EU, what is several million going to do, especially as the entire continent is slowly more and more right leaning?

In longer scale, Ocean gets warmer, plankton dies, we start running out of oxygen. Not immediately - but slowly the percentage of it in the atmosphere will start dropping. I wouldn't be surprised if in a 100 years it will be common to have oxygen supply stations on the streets and if you can afford them - personal supplies of oxygen just so you can operate at 100% mental capacity. The rest will have to make do with feeling crappy all day long.

And of course we're already starting to see signs that we might have triggered a self reinforcing loop - melting clathrates releasing methane, methane heating up the atmosphere, releasing more methane.

No, humans won't die, absolutely not. But I'm 100% certain that the civilization as we know it is fucked.

Here is some research[0] that supports your argument, but it does get even more dire than your description in the end.

[0]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12576-016-0501-0

There's a stark difference between "people will need to resettle" and "widespread extinction". Some of the coldest climates that are now largely uninhabited may thrive again, as they have in the past.

Climate change, at any large enough timescale, is completely unavoidable. It's also (to me) inconceivable that humanity will agree to limit its standard of living now just so that climate change can be somewhat mitigated.

> No, humans won't die, absolutely not. But I'm 100% certain that the civilization as we know it is fucked.

In that regard, I'd be much more worried about the prospects of a nuclear war than about climate change.

>I'd be much more worried about the prospects of a nuclear war than about climate change

Climate change seems like just the sort of thing that might start wars.

So does Twitter.

While I can believe we can manage the heat somewhat, I do not believe we can manage the declining oxygen levels. I think it's actually made worse by the fact that the decline is so incredibly slow - coming up with a solution will always be something that can be left "for the next generation". And humans can survive at 20% oxygen. At 19%. At 18%. But after a certain point, you're just starting to feel like crap, but hey - just buy yourself some oxygen, right? Free market will solve that problem. If, of course, the free market still exists at that point. I am of course being sarcastic.

Why do you believe that? Tibetans, for instance, are already genetically adapted to high altitudes where ordinary people may have some health issues. Mountain climbers can adapt to lower effective oxygen levels in a relatively short amount of time.

Again, some of our ape ancestors evolved in a time with far lower oxygen levels. After that, oxygen levels rose higher, but they have been drifting downwards for millions of years since then.

Our current society will go extinct and petroleum resources being exhausted means we may not be able to rebuild anything like it.

Petroleum resources will never be exhausted.

If fossil fuels become too expensive to pump out of the ground, some other process of creating them will replace that. Perhaps it'll come out of the atmosphere:

https://carbonengineering.com/about-a2f/

> the petroleum industry gets billions in tax subsidies yearly already, so this would be a leveling of the playing field

Well... this is Norway. The oil industry isn't subsidized by the government, the government is subsidized by the oil industry.

I liked this story:

"The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil" (2009) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19594153

The government IS the oil industy. They own 50-70% of every big oil company.

A most interesting event happens once say 25% of all cars are EV's, which may happen 5 years down the road. Gas stations will have to raise prices a bit to remain profitable, and some will have to close. At that point likely noone will buy petrol cars, as the writing is on the wall. The impact that will have on their price makes EV's the much better investment, even today.

I've mentioned before a friend that lives in a small town with one gas station. Their gas is expensive. So everyone tries to get gas when they do their weekly shopping 80 miles away. It's the town you would think wouldn't be a candidate for electric vehicles. But a Tesla Model 3, Late Model Leaf or Chevy Bolt could make the shopping run. Especially if there was a charger at the Walmart. Bonus you can top batteries up at home and not worry about running out of gas and getting bent over by the local gas station.

If the gas station stopped selling gas then electric would be the only real viable option.

> - Many people have a relatively short commute, so limited range EVs like Nissan Leaf or e-Golf do just fine.

Doesn’t this negate a lot of the benefits of de-ICEing vehicles?

Why doesn’t the government use gas tax increases as a tool instead of up-front discounts?

Getting the 100km/day driver to change from ICE to electric would have 10x the impact as the 10km/day driver.

ICE cars pollute especially strongly on short trips in cold temperatures as all exhaust treatment systems need to get up to temperature before they work.

Yep. Especially modern diesels are just a nightmare of incredibly complex systems all existing purely to keep the engine somewhat clean when it's cold - once it warms up(which can be as much as 10-20km in really cold climates, more than the commute for many people) it's fine, but keeping it efficient while cold is a huge challenge.

>Doesn’t this negate a lot of the benefits of de-ICEing vehicles?

Sure some of the benefits, but the context is in the discussion of incentives and the attractiveness for the average buyer. 10km/day drivers have their needs sufficiently met with cheaper, shorter-range EVs.

Most 10km/day drivers would have their needs met with a bicycle

In Norway in winter? Not so much!

> Why doesn’t the government use gas tax increases as a tool instead of up-front discounts?

Given the huge corpus of two datapoints (Norway and France), it seems that:

- if you offer discounts on EVs, people who own gas-powered cars will progressively replace them with EVs ;

- if you increases gas taxes, people who own gas-powered cars will spend their saturday afternoons demanding your head on a spike, and stop voting for you until you roll-back on the gas tax increases. (At which point, they will mostly keep not voting for you, but that's an unrelated debate.)

I suspect not every government has the benefit of choosing between both options - Norway might be an outlier here.

(And most government will probably choose the "wise" third path of doing nothing.)

My underlying theory (that must have been tested by Cialdinni, Khaneman or Ophra) is that rebates feel good, and taxes feel bad. But I don't have a double-blind placebo-controlled experiment to cite.

Norway is already about $2 USD per litre of petrol. In the US it's $0.79.

According to https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

(Or $7.5 per US Gallon in Norway)

> - if you increases gas taxes, people who own gas-powered cars will spend their saturday afternoons demanding your head on a spike

This is exactly why gas taxes are bad.

> is that rebates feel good, and taxes feel bad

You can also like some California air quality districts are doing buy back low income peoples junkers and provide them down payment assistance for hybrid and electric cars. There is a lot less political blow back from those sorts of programs.

But, again, you have to be in a position where you can afford such policies. I'm perfectly ready to hear that Norway and California can afford it, and France can not.

> Getting the 100km/day driver to change from ICE to electric would have 10x the impact as the 10km/day driver.

-Not if there are 20 times as many 10km/day drivers as 100km/day ones.

Put another way - if the bulk of commutes are fairly short, the advantages of having these becoming electric is larger than that of electrifying the comparatively few long commutes - doubly so as an ICE is a much worse polluter when cold than at proper running temperature.

Gas taxes affect those who already have a gas car and may not have the budget to replace it.

Point-of-purchase taxes affect the choice of which vehicle to buy at the point where you were already deciding which vehicle to buy.

Point of purchases taxes are also poor in that they fail to reflect the damage that particular car will do. For example - a Lamborghini will have outrageous taxes due to high emissions, but a Lamborghini is usually only driven 10-20k miles in its lifetime, nearly never for commute, and usually only filled up with best fuels and well maintained. Then in comparison a Fiat Panda will have tiny emissions taxes if any, even though compared to that Lamborghini it will pollute far more through its lifetime.

No, I think fuel taxes are the right way to do this - the more fuel you use the more you drive = the more you pollute.

You can certainly estimate the damage a particular car model will do and impose an appropriate excise tax. While the damage to the environment from people driving Lamborghini's is a rounding error. So would a carbon excise tax. If you charged $100/ton of CO2 that would be about $15k on top of a $400k price tag.

You are missing the energy used to make the car!

Driving a vehicle on 10-20k is shocking from an environmental perspective once you include manufacturing.

Exactly!!!

I keep harping on that. Consider a 10 year old Toyota Camry. Soon as it was built we were committed to another 60 tons of CO2 emissions. Raising the gas tax doesn't undo that decision. And people don't junk cars because the price of gas. They junk cars because of maintenance and repair costs.

Raising gas taxes is totally weak sauce and invites political blow back. Better to just pay people to take marginal cars off the road. And discourage people from buying new ICE powered cars. Especially low MPG ICE cars.

ICE fuel is very highly taxed already.

The first few km are the most polluting especially for NOx. Part of the push for electric is about NOx emissions rather than CO2.

Just chime in and say that hybrid vehicles have a fifth to a tenth the NOx emissions of regular cars. Currently there are a lot more hybrid cars available than EV's.

In addition to what the others have mentioned, this assumes those 100km/day drivers realistically can switch to an EV.

Most of those live in more remote areas of the country, which have lower population density and as such get charging station coverage later.

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