Slashdot Mirror
Paris, Madrid, Athens, Mexico City Will Ban Diesel Vehicles By 2025 (bbc.com)
The mayors of four major global cities -- Paris, Mexico City, Madrid and Athens -- announced plans to stop the use of all diesel-powered cars and trucks by 2025. The leaders made their commitments in Mexico at a biennial meeting of city leaders. BBC reports: At the C40 meeting of urban leaders in Mexico, the four mayors declared that they would ban all diesel vehicles by 2025 and "commit to doing everything in their power to incentivize the use of electric, hydrogen and hybrid vehicles." "It is no secret that in Mexico City, we grapple with the twin problems of air pollution and traffic," said the city's mayor, Miguel Angel Mancera. "By expanding alternative transportation options like our Bus Rapid Transport and subway systems, while also investing in cycling infrastructure, we are working to ease congestion in our roadways and our lungs." Paris has already taken a series of steps to cut the impact of diesel cars and trucks. Vehicles registered before 1997 have already been banned from entering the city, with restrictions increasing each year until 2020. The use of diesel in transport has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, as concerns about its impact on air quality have grown. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that around three million deaths every year are linked to exposure to outdoor air pollution. Diesel engines contribute to the problem in two key ways -- through the production of particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). Very fine soot PM can penetrate the lungs and can contribute to cardiovascular illness and death. Nitrogen oxides can help form ground level ozone and this can exacerbate breathing difficulties, even for people without a history of respiratory problems. The diesel ban is hugely significant. Carmakers will look at this decision and know it's just a matter of time before other city mayors follow suit.
Except that they're destroying the planet. But aside from that, yeah.
There is not replacement for diesel for any truck
Sure there is: news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/03/130318-natural-gas-truck-stops/
Europe is already moving to natural gas for ships while in port to clean up emissions.
Funnily enough the article is talking about cities with millions of people. I haven't visited the other 3 but it certainly is possible to live without a car in Madrid.
That recent builds were more efficient than gasoline, and with less processing in the raw material overall it should be better?
Define cleaner. Diesel did run cleaner for certain definitions. It always was dirtier in terms of particulate count. It was always cleaner in terms of CO why it was lauded as better than petrol. Unfortunately it has far higher NOx emissions which more recently (recent in terms of a time scale of 50 years) has been linked to various ill health.
As for processing, that depends and the answer is no. In theory you could cut diesel out of crude and be done with it. In practice you won't meet any of the fuel standards in doing so, especially sulphur content so at the very least diesel needs to be hydofined. But in terms of where diesel comes from in the process, you can get it through distillation, vacuum distillation, visbraking, fluidised catalytic cracking, coking, hydrocracking, and those are just the simple processes. And most refineries have them interconnected to get more and more out of crude oil. Even the simplest refineries will have distillation + vacuum distillation + hydrofining with the bottom of the distillation process taken to a visbreaker and then to a cat cracker and then back through a hydrofiner.
But in practice no one makes just diesel so saying there's less processing is nonsense as any refinery will have units that produce both diesel and petrol components, and then specific units to polish up just the diesel, and just the petrol among other things. So there really isn't any efficiency gains to get by talking about processing.
We on the Left don't care. We're way too smart and sophisticated to need to do this "listen" or "paying attention" thing. There is only one proper way to live and that is ours. If you're not one of us you're subhuman and do not deserve to live. End of debate. Anyone who disagrees is a fascist.