France Set To Ban Sale of Petrol and Diesel Vehicles By 2040 (bbc.com)

France is planning to ban the sale of any car that uses petrol or diesel fuel by 2040. The planned ban on fossil fuel vehicles is part of a renewed commitment to the Paris climate deal, reports BBC. From the report: Hybrid cars make up about 3.5% of the French market, with pure electric vehicles accounting for just 1.2%. It is not yet clear what will happen to existing fossil fuel vehicles still in use in 2040. President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement in June was explicitly named as a factor in France's new vehicle plan. "France has decided to become carbon neutral by 2050 following the U.S. decision," Nicolas Hulot, France's ecology minister, said, adding that the government would have to make investments to meet that target. Poorer households would receive financial assistance to replace older, more polluting vehicles with cleaner ones, he said. Other targets set in the French environmental plan include ending coal power plants by 2022, reducing nuclear power to 50% of total output by 2025, and ending the issuance of new oil and gas exploration licenses.

Comments

Nuclear hate?

[ElectraFlarefire]

I've never fully understood the huge hate and 'we need to go carbon neutral, so we'll back off one of the biggest carbon neutral power sources we have' thing..
Nuclear power is safe, efficient, clean and very well regulated. There are better tech, like Thorium medium term and Fusion long term that need to take over from it, but for the next 100 years or so, it would be a brilliant way to get lots of power, very cleanly.

This isn't the 60's.. Reactor tech has improved a /lot/. All the big disasters have been plants that should have been replaced many years ago and often during conditions that were far outside what they were designed for.

But hey, 'nuke plants are bad' makes better headlines than 'This isn't without it's downsides but it's better than most of what we have'.

Re:Nuclear hate?

[blindseer]

A better bet by far is to figure ways of improving energy storage.

Or, we can do more than one thing at a time.

You think that a battery cares where the energy used to charge it comes from? Sure, we can build up 3GW of solar, build out massive battery banks to last through the night. We can also build a 1GW nuclear power plant, a much smaller battery bank to last through the day, and let that nuclear reactor just putt-putt along at a nice even pace. Nuclear would mean less land needed, less labor, less material dug from the ground, just generally cheaper in the end really.

Strictly speaking nuclear power is non-renewable, so it fails on that front.

In long enough time scales neither is the sun and wind. There's enough nuclear fuel, easily accessible, on the surface of the Earth to last until the sun burns out. If "renewable" means "until the sun consumes the atmosphere" then nuclear is renewable.

If France thinks that it is possible to make electric cars more attractive than petroleum burning ones in 20 years then it should be possible to make nuclear power more attractive than coal in 20 years. Oh, and we can likely solve that problem of recycling the nuclear waste by then too. We solved the problem of coal ash, they call it "coal combustion products" and sell it as industrial feedstock. We could do something similar with spent nuclear fuel too.

Re:Is the production of new vehicles accounted for

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't take more energy to produce a more efficient vehicle.

You've overlooked an important and painfully obvious fact : it takes a lot more energy to produce a NEW vehicle of any kind and any efficiency than it requires to not produce a new vehicle at all.

Depending on the amount of usage, there's a significant probability that driving an older vehicle which is reasonably fuel-efficient makes more sense than scrapping it and building a whole new vehicle. You can play with math all day long, but the notion that scrapping all the cars in a nation and starting over is an idea that would only make sense if you were in the business of making and selling cars.

I don't know what you do for a living, but I am certain you are not a trained engineer. Of course that won't stop you from commenting on subjects you know little or nothing about. By the way, the "normal" service life of a vehicle is a variable concept, though the car makers would love you to believe it is only as long as the term of your car loan.

Re:Vehicle Ban?

[Pig Hogger]

Why not let things unfold naturally if possible?

Because experience shows that the free market **NEVER** finds the most ecologically-sound solution.

Re:Is the production of new vehicles accounted for

[Immerman]

Not completely meaningless - it establishes momentum, and serves notice to industry that they should get more serious about focusing investment in the relevant technologies.

And once the automotive and surrounding industries are significantly invested, then even if the ban is delayed or abandoned they still have incentive to recoup those costs by actually producing the new classes of vehicle that have been designed and tooled for.

Re:I wonder what's going to happen to the mid east

[thegarbz]

As someone once said

Kenneth S. Deffeyes. A top R&D person at Shell. That adds some extra weight to that quote.

We'll be using oil long after every car, bus, and motorbike in the world has gone electric.

Re:I wonder what's going to happen to the mid east

[TheRaven64]

Many of those processes can use vegetable oils just as easily though. When you start with crude oil, you first have to split it into different hydrocarbon chain lengths, and you then crack and polymerise it until you have the lengths that you actually want. There's a lot less variation in vegetable oils than in crude, and it's just a matter of energy to transform them - the nice thing about crude oil is that there's often enough energy from burning the bits that have too high an energy cost to want to transform into useful hydrocarbons to power a lot of these processes. If you have another abundant energy source, then the cost of shipping crude oil from the middle east may outweigh the cost of producing the hydrocarbons that you want from locally grown oil crops.