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Comment by conjectures | Hacker News Reader

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 could you do X, Y, and Z too?

Yes, the government expects people to lap this up. Which is a reason why they do it. If they see electric cars both piss off the Daily Mail camp and yet are still criticised as worthless by environmentalists then we're not giving them the right incentives to take further measures.

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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 until the ban would be spent building enough solar, carbon capture and fuel generation, we'd be in a much better state. We'd literally have a knob that controls the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

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."

Why does China get a free pass? It's the worlds largest miner of coal and is building many new coal fired power stations. For instance. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/riozim-se... and https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-will-china-build-hundre...

Who mentioned China? USA is more of a problem, twice the CO2 emissions per capita as the average developed economy, China makes more EV busses every day than the rest of the world has in total.

China has levelled of since 2011 while still maintaining their incredible economic growth. Quite remarkable actually. On the other hand it's quite easy to spot the outliers.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

US CO2 emissions per capita have been declining significantly since 2011.

I find it entirely reasonable that largest country by the population in the world is also largest miner of coal. That is exactly how it should be. Now the bigger issue is with countries that don't rank similarly to their population size...

Why do you think they does? I’m so tired of always hearing the deflection: “oh lock at China, they are much worse”. No, they aren’t. Their per capita emissions are still much lower than Europe and North America. I wish they did more, but the productive (and mature) thing to do is to focus on what we should do, not whine about what someone else should.

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