EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of gasoline cars by 2035
cnn.com
cnn.com
"EU Proposes To Exempt Private Jets From Fuel Tax": https://bitluxtravel.com/eu-proposes-to-exempt-private-jets-...
That's mostly done by a certain Mr. Putin.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/chevrons-ceo-says-... [2] https://nypost.com/2022/05/23/biden-praises-gas-prices-as-pa...
I don't expect society to spend hundreds of millions on making public transport available to the 30% of the Finnish population who live outside urban areas. It will, however, take more than a decade before EV's are viable alternatives to everyone living in the countryside; the power grid needs extensive renovations, power production needs to get away from fossil fuels and the EV's themselves need to be both capable and cheap enough for people to afford them. I can buy 20 year-old car in working order for about 600€ today if I want to. Even cheaper if I don't care about electric windows.
I know people who would barely be able to afford such a purchase if their current car broke down. None of them will be able to afford a used EV anytime soon, and I suspect, not in '25 either.
That being said, EV's is a good thing. We need synthetic petrol and diesel until they're able to fill all needs currently filled by ICE cars, though. We're going to need it for farming and forestry equipment and the like anyway, so we might aswell get that ball rolling.
What is unrealistic to me is your expectation to live in a remote area but still get easy access to other areas. Why don't you try to live closer to your job, or work closer to your home?
I don't understand why I should also pay (breathing your pollution is paying for me) for your desire to live away from a city. If it's your choice, you should pay the full cost of it.
However, as I said, there's plenty of others who aren't as fortunate. Most of those I know, are born out here, work in agriculture, and don't see why they should keep producing cheap food for city-dwellers, when all they do is try to limit their ability to keep the production going. And I assure you; urban areas in Europe will not want to be depending on food imports this fall.
Again, as I mentioned, synthetic fuels are the way to go until electrification is done. While food occasionally does grow on trees, harvesting is almost completely dependent on fossil fuels. The power grid is being upgraded, albeit slowly (and believe me: we're paying a lot for the work). The forestry industrycan't run without diesel.
Electrifying everything will take time. If we want it done faster we need synthetic fuels. Preferably yesterday.
Giving up on recent developments sounds good in principle, but the fact is that energy usage in the middle classes is slowly going down. If we want an equal distribution of energy usage, then we'd need to go back to pre-WW2 levels in order to be sustainable. And that somehow assumes we retain our current ability to produce clean technology while reducing usage to a level that most people simply won't accept. The middle class wasted a _lot_ of energy in the 60's and early 70's.
I remain optimistic in hoping that multiple smaller solutions will be enough to prevent the proverbial shit from hitting the fan. Synth fuels is one such solution. As is EV's, insulating homes, or being better at keeping old infrastructure running for longer in order to avoid wasting resources on replacing said old infrastructure. Not because they solve the root cause of the problem, but because it's better than to keep going with fossil fuels, or to force changes without being at all prepared for the consequences. I'm not saying you're wrong. But I remain hopeful that you are.
Lots of wear & tear and energy consumption. A bus is much more expensive to maintain and uses much more energy than a car.
Replacing fossil fuel infrastructure is also very costly to government budgets since existing investment are sunk costs.
How about we forget about those "influential and powerful" people for just a second and worry about the little guy who relies on having cheap energy available to get to work? The ones who, when the price of energy goes up, have to decide between buying vegetables for their kids that week instead of cheap junk food vs filling up the tank to get a paycheck?
Or the ones that live in a not so great house who need to fill up the oil tank to get through winter without freezing to death. Or the ones who live at the edge of death valley and need air conditioning to have a semblance of comfort in the summer? Or the ones who live in apartments with no ability to charge an electric vehicle.
Can we (not you specifically but collectively) please, for once, start worrying about them too instead of pretending the reason this problem is so complex is because of the big bad greedy corporations?
Surely the issue is relying on cheap energy then, not the fact that its no longer available. I've just checked US prices and they're about $1.30 a litre. compared to Europe that is cheap. but then we have more fuel efficient cars. If you want to talk about knock on inflationary pressures then I'd probably agree with you, but my fuel costs roughly twice what yours costs, and its still not causing a major dent in my finances, and most of my driving isn't for work.
>decide between buying vegetables for their kids that week instead of cheap junk food
Why do people claim that junk food is cheaper than veg? A low carbon diet probably coincides quite nicely with a low cost diet, I know my major food costs are meat (and alcohol), veg is basically a rounding error.
There's plenty of alternatives to moving people than the car, such as walking, cycling and a variety of forms of public transit, all of which are more efficient and less CO2 intensive than the car.
The reason for the legislative focus on cars is because amongst all the various things we need to do to lower CO2 emissions, it is one of the most relatively easiest shifts to make.
The additional upside as well is that at a local city level, cars are an enormous percentage of CO2 emissions, and on top of the whole limiting climate change thing, shifting to electric is going to have real every day positive impacts in air quality.
Also, tankers and cargo ships have inefficient engines what if International Maritime Organization enforced emission limits like for cars?
* Cows produce methane, cars produce CO2. Talking about "pollution" just muddies the waters. According to https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector lifestock produces 6% of greenhouse gases, road transport 12%. Also looking at Germany (I don't have data for all of Europe), drinking milk production fell by 7% in one year (replaced by plant based milk) https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/05/PE22_N034_51.html . Beef production fell by 2.4% (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/02/PE22_050_413.html ) So changes are happening in agriculture as well.
* Supertanker emit a lot of soot, not so much CO2. Again: Talking about pollution in generic terms does not help. Also supertankers won't be needed anymore, if no oil is consumed. So electric cars will help with this as well. Replacing all fossil fuels would remove need for 40% of all tonnage shipped worldwide.
* Sweden and Norway already have basically completely renewable electric grids. Germany is exiting coal by 2038 (this will hopefully be accelerated to 2030). Every year some of the existing coal plants are being shut down: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Elektrizitaet...
* No new gas heatings will to allowed to be installed in most EU countries by 2025. Heat pumps are already the default in Scandinavia and will be in other countries soon.
* Hydrogen production is being ramped up: https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/germany-s-fir... or https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... to replace gas usage where electricity does not work.
So a lot is happening in all sectors. And you can see results: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t... This is not just virtue signalling.
Nuclear is the only, well, nuclear solution
Nuclear also goes stale once in a while, when plants are taken offline for maintenance.
Solar is predictable, it generates in the day (when demand is highest), not at night. With connected vehicles you have massive battery banks of power that can be bought back from people, and as you've used the excess energy when you have been producing more than the demand from those resources to create green hydrogen, you reverse the process.
Same for solar. It's not predicatable on day-by-day bases.
With using cars as battery banks, even if you skip the problem of having cars connected all the time, you'll need to redo grid in a big way. Both to fill simultaneously cars if cheap solar energy hits the grid and keep the grid going on a stale cloudy day.
On the flip side when there's surplus that's used to make the hydrogen, to recharge the resovoirs, etc.
Many people feed back to the grid with their home solar etc, no difference to electric charging.
Not many cloudy days in the Moroccon deserts
The other issue is, how much grid upgrades do you need to allow to keep it up from electric cars? Maybe even on green front it'd be better to have stable power generation with simplified grid. All those beefy substations don't come out of thin air.
The EU currently learns every day that depending on unreliable countries is a bad idea for your energy needs. But I think we will still find solutions without involving unreliable partners by extending the cooperation within the EU.
you know that the latter will solve the former. and fuel prices are more about a certain invasion so not so much about the environment. So which do you want to complain about?
And of course, no one is asking people to get rid of car, just not to buy any ICE car after 2035. Today, there are already lots of electrical cars to choose from and the offerings will definitely increase going forward, especially as now car manufacturers have a clear deadline for combustion engines.
This is anti-petrol, not anti-car. They haven't banned the sale of cars.
The EU is aiming to meet its Paris agreement on coal reduction by 2050 (and many other countries before that, UK eliminating use of coal by 2024, Germany by 2030) https://climateanalytics.org/briefings/eu-coal-phase-out/#:~....
Many people are also reducing their use of cows. Just going after the biggest polluter one by one will take far too long.
And government has the power to change things. Europe has a 12% BEV share in new cars because of subsidies and regulations: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/05/29/stellantis-wins-1-2-in-...
Norway has a 85% share of BEVs in new cars because of even more government intervention.
In some ways its good, theres companies investing money to develop new cars, its not right to just drop something like this on them, then theres other infrastructure, houses, flats that need chargers etc.
But. Theres always the tendency to make the announcement but not follow it up in any practical way. eg in the UK they're phasing out gas (only) boilers from 2025, but they don't seem to have decided if they're replacing this with hydrogen / methane / heat pumps or what. I don't want to make a multi decadal investment without knowing what the government is going to back.
Scroll to Europe on both EV charger maps. The ongoing complaints about charging infra seems to come form a place of being uninformed (in Europe specifically, complaints elsewhere are still somewhat valid). Existing infra is getting more robust daily, and chargers can be installed anywhere there is existing power infra or space for solar, batteries, and charging stalls beneath the solar canopy. DC fast charging is at most 20-40 minutes (assuming V2 and above Superchargers or CCS). Level 2 charging, 4-8 hours roughly, can occur overnight at homes and hotels, or during the day at businesses/workplaces.
Automakers have over 12 years to retool to make and sell only EVs; that is the point, to force them to do so in a reasonable amount of time. The EU could push harder if they wanted (2030). Norway’s combustion vehicle sales ban kicks in in 2025, but they’ve already reached almost 100% of EV sales 2.5 years ahead of the ban.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
Petrol stations are ubiquitous and take 1-2mins to fill a car. We are going to need a lot more charging stations than pumps if we are to make this work for a fully or mostly EV population.
That has always been the problem with electricity, it can not be stored and you need to size for your peek.
Or they just take an electric train and then hire an electric car locally to get around
I have a 20 mile (each way), steep commute, which is more energy intensive than most people. (The average US commute is 16 miles.)
My car gets 4.5 miles / kWh, and I have a 16A, 110v charger plugged into a standard outdoor electrical socket at my house (the charger cost ~ $200 on Amazon, and standard US 110v circuits are 20 amp).
This is more than adequate for me. I use under 10 kWh per day on average, which means the car has to charge for about 6 hours a day. It's plugged in at night, and while at work, so I could do the commute twice a day, no problem. In Europe, it would be a 220v socket, halving the charge time for the same amperage.
So, as long as the multi-family homes have one 110V outdoor circuit per EV they need to charge, they're already fine for normal commute days, even if there's no charger at work. Running additional standard 110V circuit to the outside shouldn't be too expensive (though, obviously 220V would be preferable, assuming the electrical box for the house can handle it).
If I used all my sockets at their maximum rating I'd trip that 100A, but equally I could put an 80A circuit off this and draw 14kW to charge my car without worrying too much (other than the cost!)
Is a typical supply 100A on each phase (so 300A total), or lower?
Norway and Belgium are outliers, AFAIK but even these countries switch to 3*400V+N.
There was a recent experiment, where all renters in a large complex got an electric car for a year, it turned out they very rarely charged at the same time, even less than expected.
I assume they'll be exemptions for tractors, HGVs, etc, but even so for the person who travels hundreds of miles a week across country for their job, do we think they'll be consigned to buying used cars, or that the infra will be in place?
I want to believe, I just don't see it happening.
Have a look on https://www.carwow.co.uk/electric-cars/charging-points I bet there's more around than you think.
Given that fast charging and electric cars with ranges of 400 miles are available right now I don't think that the 2030 deadline is all that crazy given that the number of charge points is only going to grow.
The aim is for 300,000 public changing points by 2030, currently there are around 30,000.
If you live in a rural area just park on your drive and plug in to your wall.
Motorways have long corridors, no reason they can't have long power feeders to rapid chargers at service stations. At 40kW and 4 miles per kWh that's 160 miles per hour to charge. Assuming you start off with a full tank of 300 miles, you drive for 2.5 hours at 70mph (175 miles), stop for half an hour as recommended (topping up 80 more miles), drive for another 2.5 hours, and you've done 350 miles before you reach your destination.
Or maybe you should use the train to do the long distance part and hire a car at the far end, certainly what I usually do.