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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.
I wonder what's going to happen to the mid east when the only thing they have that's of any value is suddenly without value?
No need to wonder. Just have a look at what is going on in Venezuela right now.
Hydrocarbons and oil are still an extremely valuable resource, even if we aren't burning it for its BTUs. It's an integral part of the feed stocks for many chemical processes, and we'd be hard pressed to change those out. As someone once said "Crude oil is really too valuable to be burning."
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>"France Set To Ban Sale of Petrol and Diesel Vehicles"
>"France is planning to ban the sale of any car that uses petrol or diesel"
So which is it? Vehicles or cars? Motorcycles are not cars, neither are scooters, trucks, tractors, boats....
Why is it that so many governments and people are so hot on just outright "BANNING" things? Why not let things unfold naturally if possible? Or if absolutely necessary, why not tax "petrol" and/or gasoline cars a little higher and higher and use that money to build up the electric charging infrastructure, bolster battery/storage science, and support electric cars in other ways to slowly make them more attractive?
Things take time and artificially ramming one plan down everyone's throats just makes lots of people unhappy. If electric vehicles do what they promise (and Tesla seems to be able to show they will, and without any forced mandates, btw), people will naturally gravitate to them. Quiet, fast, reliable, efficient, smooth... and eventually even more convenient, when they become generally affordable, the market demand will take care of itself. Again, the Tesla example: Tesla Roadster-> Tesla S/X -> Tesla 3, each generation being refined and more affordable, and without any government "planning" the path for them.
It doesn't take more energy to produce a more efficient vehicle.
The target date is 2040. Since there are no road vehicles with a "normal service life" over 20 years, it shouldn't be a big issue.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Distant. but a realistic date. First, it sends a signal to the auto industry that they better start planning for a petrol/diesel phase out. Second, it gives time to build the infrastructure to support whatever new fueling method ends up winning out.
Now one thing to point out, they're not talking about eliminating ICEs. You very well could have an ICE running on methane, propane or alcohol for example and those would be allowed. So a interim mandate of hybrids or some particular technology is shortsighted too.
I do admit though, this is a lot more hope than action.
That's about right. France, or any nation, cannot be "carbon neutral" without nuclear power. I don't care if you got 23 years to plan that out, unless they are sitting on some leap in technology that no one is telling me about then this is bullshit.
Replacing all the cars with electric, while also reducing use of coal and nuclear? That's not happening.
Barring some leap in technology we have three choices:
- Keep burning coal and oil
- Switch to nuclear
- Partying like it's 1799
Sure, you can keep the lights on with solar, hydro, and wind but you can't keep heavy industry going on wind, water, and sun.
With 23 years being greater than 2 I believe it's not happening. Maybe if they made an announcement of a goal close to 8 years, like JFK did on planning to go to the moon, then I might believe them.
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The difference being that the major powers will have far less incentive to get involved - which has pretty consistently gone badly for them. They had been doing a pretty good job of getting their act together, with long-warring tribal kingdoms consolidating into peaceful democracies before the US and allies overthrew their governments rather than have them ally with the Russians during WWI/II.
Heck, just stop propping up Israel's militant government to maintain a loyal foothold in the region, and regional tensions would likely ease quite rapidly, though perhaps rather bloodily.
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Less than 5% of the vehicles on the road are over 20 years old.
France's plan is to stop the SALE of petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Not to force them all off the road. If Toyota is still building gasoline cars in 2039, and you buy one, you'll still be able to drive it 500,000 in France. But your next car will have to be different.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What are you talking about? The crisis in Venezuela barely has something to do with oil. Besides, Venezuela is full of natural resources and food, the Middle East is basically a desert.
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Read up on a little history. The chaos in the modern Middle East stems from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in the first World War. The European victors carved up its territory into colonies along the modern borders we see today, with little to no regard for the cultural, religious, and socio-political boundaries of the indigenous people. Culturally, it would've made more sense to divide it into Turkey, Kurdistan, and Arabia, and maybe a few other countries to reflect local Sunni/Shia enclaves.
That's why you have Iraq trying to get Sunni and Shia, Kurds and Arabs trying to stay in the same room long enough without killing each other to form something resembling a "national" government. There is no socio-political reason for "Iraq" to exist as a country - it's borders are an artificial construct created by some ignorant Europeans drawing lines on a map for land whose people they knew next to nothing about. The U.S. and Soviet Union may have played off this chaos, but they didn't cause it. Europe did.
You're right but you left out a crucial factor - the same one that makes biofuels a bad idea. Using vegetable oils for industrial processes directly competes with using agricultural resources for food. Lets forget that food is just about the only truly unavoidable requirement for life we actually buy (we get water for free in most of the world, and nobody has yet managed to pollute enough of the atmosphere that they can make money selling air - though I'm sure quite a lot of CEOs get wet dreams about one day making the atmosphere unbreathable and cashing in on sales of a product nobody can live without for more than 3 minutes).
Any competing use of agricultural output drives up food prices, and ends up killing people - that makes it a politically hard sell to begin with. Secondly it also means that the price at which you can buy it for industrial processes is driven up by the fact that other people are willing to pay good money for that same source - because they'll starve without it.
In a world where we do NOT burn crude oil and remove the single biggest competitor for the resource, it's quite likely that the price of crude for plastics will end up significantly lower than vegetable oils - because unlike vegetables, nobody else is clamoring to buy crude oil for dinner.
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What are you talking about? The crisis in Venezuela barely has something to do with oil.
Excuse me, but an economy where roughly 50% of GDP is based on oil as are 95% of it is not at all diversified and is bound to fluctuate a bit like the oil price. Source: http://www.economicshelp.org/b...
While it is true that Venezuela has also a lot of political and historical problems, a lot of the current crisis seems to come from lack of economic diversity and large dependence on oil price.
There's a nice podcast about the current crisis in Venezuela (about 30 min) which I recommend:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...
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