Well the energy transition better be over by October or we're in for an unfathomable crisis here in the old world.
But if so, they underestimated how much this could cripple economies.
When you've got the elite/ruling-class flying in to climate conferences on dozens of private jets, it's clear who isn't going to modify their lifestyle for the sake of the environment.
EVs will remain luxuries for the relatively wealthy. You need a spacious home with a garage or at least a driveway if you want to charge at home. No luck if you're in an apartment. And there's still no sign of serious efforts to build charging infrastructure on a 'for the masses' scale, despite bans on new ICE cars planned for less than a decade from now.
(If we get to the point of fully-autonomous self-driving taxis being a thing - they'll be owned in bulk by the super-rich and their corporations, not by regular individuals. It'll probably be illegal for a regular citizen to operate such a service, even when the tech is ubiquitous)
But why? How does it benefit them? The "oil companies lobbying in the US to make car-free lifestyle difficult" conspiracy makes sense because it benefits them, but how does it benefit the elite in europe to "price the working class off the roads, with no alternative beyond walking or cycling"?
As an added bonus, they're all now crammed into tiny apartments that don't require much carbon emission to heat or cool, and where they don't have space for many physical possessions (less consumption of physical resources, more spend/profits on digital/virtual products)
Meanwhile, the elite can have even more massive rural estates, and drive their luxury EVs on a near-empty road network to and from their private jets.
The problem comes when all the forced-city-dwellers want to escape their urban prison at the weekends... With real travel unaffordable if not outright prohibited, I guess that'll be where the 'metaverse' comes in?...
There doesn’t have to be a reason why someone believes in it.
It's not enough but there are 2,000 EV charging stations installed in the EU every week. 10,000 would be better but we're not even one order of magnitude off the target.
I forsee a huge bait+switch, with sky-high prices once enough people have invested in an EV and are dependent on the service, and once the charging service providers have built up local monopolies on public charging.
If charging station prices skyrocketed, competition would appear overnight with chargers popping up in every available parking space until the prices stabilized at something reasonable enough for sustaining the industry at a FMV.
In theory, anyone can open a new charging station. Also, in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice - they are not. In the real world, economies of scale and supply chain limitations basically guarantee an outcome of oligopolies coalescing into a silent cartel, each of them happily milking their 5-10% margins without any desire to rock the boat.
Tesla's are rather niche, as a percentage of vehicles on the road it's insignificant. There's not enough demand yet. Tesla drivers are still largely well-heeled early adopters of a luxury brand, of course they're going to be exploited.
The up front investment is higher but the long term costs are lower. If you think in purely purchase money terms you can trick yourself to think a Yugo or Skoda or Yaris or Leaf etc. is cheaper, but I factor in safety and fun, so my calculation differs.
If a big retail chain does a deal with one company to provide a number of chargers in each of its car parks, the contract will likely prohibit the use of other providers to install more charging points.
Who ever gets in first can most likely ensure they control the vast majority of the car parks in the local area - all the major retailers and apartment complexes. They'll probably offer to install chargers for free so long as they get to bill for the power.
Once demand is high enough, they don't need a perfect monopoly, if the dominant company has a plentiful supply of chargers and the cheaper competitor only has a few and there's constant queues for them.
And who will give you a permission to build your own infrastructure to generate electricity on top of your apartment building?
It won't be long before there's heavy taxes on EV charging, to make up for the lost fuel tax revenue. Were're not going to escape governments taking their cut, but if we can prevent a big slice of the revenue from going directly into private pockets, that'd be a good thing.
Some states are adding punitive EV and hybrid registration fees that are equivalent to a fuel tax paid for a 13 MPG truck. They provide the justification that fuel tax needs to be fully replaced, EVs are heavier vehicles causing more road wear, and since EV owners are wealthier on average it's a progressive tax.
Amsterdam has decent public charging infra. The best (and having biggest quantity) in Europe even. Heck even the Netherlands in its whole on its own accounts for most of the public charging points in Europe. Finding a public charing point is entirely possible in Amsterdam even though still a nuisance sometimes.
But go outside Amsterdam and the situation deteriorates exponentially. Outside Amsterdam I don't count on being able to charge most of the time. I went to a vacation park last month and they had one charging point for the entire park, with no alternative in a radius of 20 km. Outside the Netherlands I don't count on being able to charge at all.
This is a huge failure in foresight.
"Just use slow, crowded, unsafe and inefficient public transit" "Don't worry about me, I have to be chauffeured around, security reasons you know!"
"Just give away your guns. You don't need them for protection, you and your kids will be safe with the police" "Me? Oh it's different. See I need theses armed bodyguards with me. For security reasons you know!"
Many European countries have efficient public transit. Some allow firearms. One territory even has mandatory open carry.
Where might you be from?
Public transport is never likely to be effective in more rural areas, though.
Private Jets Set to Escape Higher EU Energy Taxes - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-09/private-j...
On the other hand, I would agree it would be better and easier with on-site charging. But it wasn’t bad at all.
"Pricing the working class off the roads and onto the sidewalk" is the sort of thing that Europeans don't really worry about, because their cities are actually built for pedestrian traffic first and cars second. American cities are built for cars first, and pedestrian traffic if you feel like death from being thrown fifty feet in the air is a good way to go. Furthermore, Europeans already pay way more for gas than we do, and this is politically allowable because most people do not drive to work in Europe. EVs are popular in America because it's the easy quick bandaid fix to the fact that making the entire population drive a powered personal vehicle to work is an environmental nightmare. Europe has trains and buses that work.
Totally agree about self-driving taxis; but again, that's an American solution to an American problem for the same reasons I mentioned above.
The real problem for Europe is going to be the coming winter. Forget pricing the poors off the roads, how about pricing the poors out of a warm home? Most of Europe's home heating gas came from Russia pre-war. And while Nordstream was very much a geopolitical bad idea, there weren't very many better options to get cheap gas into the region. In fact, this is exactly what Putin is banking on, and much of Russia's prior acts of aggression can be better understood as "what can we do to ensure we have a monopoly on European gas imports and pipelines?".
It's also a mistake to look at elites and assume they hate their population purely because they are failing them. The underlying problem is not that they are feckless dictators, it's that they have no good options. If, a decade and change ago, Germany had said no to Russian gas in response to, say, the invasion of Georgia; whoever made that decision would have been punished by being voted out for having taken away the cheap gas from people. You'd have yellow-vest protests all over the Union, and then the whole EU would sheepishly walk back to Russia and beg for the gas pipeline to be turned back on. This is the same reason why the EU has found it difficult to actually fully transition to renewables or low-carbon energy[0], and America has found it outright impossible.
In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that we won't see yellow-vests all over France[1] this winter. Petrostates have the uncanny ability to survive and evade sanctions, because their people do not have the luxury of deposing elites that fail them, and resource wealth is highly fungible. If you want to see elites that truly hate their poors, look at any country whose wealth comes out of the ground instead of from the people. In contrast, elites in democratic countries are, well, democratically accountable for any policy they implement that harms the people - even if that policy is otherwise a good idea.
[0] i.e. renewables plus nuclear; though the history of nuclear power in Europe has it's own problems
[1] Insert the appropriate cultural equivalent for your EU member state here
That’d be coal. Which Europe produces some of, but was importing from Russia until a few months ago. In general, it is not like Europe has a big pile of practically exploitable-in-reasonable-time fossil fuels that it isn’t using.
no one knows that -- you think that Exxon and crew are ready to sit down ? They fired their Dutch CEO for trying to make the transition almost twenty years ago IIR
As others in this thread say -- this change reveals the struggles between giants, not the quarrels of simple people in media that happens daily
The number of installed wind turbines in Germany has stagnated, for example. Output has increased, but that's because of repowering old installations. NIMBY rules and incredibly complex approval procedures prevent growth.
You'd think this would be all the motivation required to rapidly expand renewables. Evidently not, we'll just keep having the same conversation. Whatever.
It's like they plan nothing and just let things grow organically, which causes lots of issues and is inefficient.
These things aren't part of the physical environment, they're political realities. Are they fixable? I doubt it, like I said above, if people haven't got it by now, they never will. In the long run, Germany doesn't matter anyway, that's the good news.
I think this is VERY wrong if you believe in the severeness of (man made) climate change. It does indeed not matter as a share of emissions but if developed countries can not pull it off in a profitable way (or at least without loosing too much prosperity) the no other countries will follow (unless the WEF archieves to assemble their authoritarian super power to force everyone to comply)