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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.
when the only thing they have that's of any value is suddenly without value? I don't see how they can hope to invest away that problem because outside of oil there just isn't anything there. On the plus side the US might stop 'liberating' them...
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Creating plastics then recycling most of them seems like it won't require us to collect as much oil and that the quality of the oil may matter less. Plus if we're making LEGO bricks out of it instead of burning it, then it isn't going into the atmosphere.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm a little surprised the date they've chosen is 20+ years in the future, though its fairly typical for governments to make grandiose decisions that they will be in no way accountable for.
I'd be much more impressed if there were interim dates requiring all vehicles be hybrids, then plugin hybrids before eliminating combustion engines.
There was an interesting documentary called Pandora's Promise a few years ago which talks about it. A lot of it is FUD, many of the anti-nuclear groups pretending to be grass roots efforts are secretly funded by the fossil fuel & coal industry.
Plans for something 20+ years ahead are retarded, there's no way to know the circumstances or predict what will be going on in 2040.
More probably trying to score political points with stupid people.
Some other guy in 2038 will say "yeah.. we'll postpone this 20 more years, we're not ready".
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.
Actually it was mostly Britain and France that carved up the Ottoman Empire with Italy coming along for some scraps. Additionally the British hoped to scoop up a good chunk of Turkey proper consisting of Istanbul and the region around the sea of Marmara and the narrows by sponsoring a Greek invasion in 1919 but the Greeks got their ass kicked by Mustafa Kemal who to surprise of everybody involved turned out to be a really good military commander (read: to the surprise of the British, French and Italians, the Germans already knew his qualities as a commander) so that plan went down the tubes. The Italians quickly concluded that this was a mess not worth getting into, pulled out and started selling weapons to Kemal. I suppose you can trust the Italians to recognise a triple decker shit-sandwich with a side of bullshit when they see one. So in the end it was Britain and France who carved up the Ottoman Empire and the only reason Russia wasn't on the list is that Russia was busy tearing itself apart at the time. One of the big reasons the Ottomans allied them selves with Germany in the first place was precisely that Germany's ambitions mostly revolved around economic considerations and trade with the Ottoman Empire rather than annexing territory, kind of like American policy later became, so the Germans prior to WWI had no real ambitions to annex huge swathes of Ottoman territory whatever private fantasies Wilhelm II may have had about an oriental empire. The whole mess was then taken over by the US Government on behalf of US oil companies in the 1940s, the Russians finally made their belated appearance and that adds a third and fourth player to the list of actors responsible for the Middle East mess which in it's complete form reads: Britain, France, The United States of America and Russia. You can try to lay the mess that is the Middle East at the feet of the Europeans but it is really only Britain and France that are to blame and even they have little or no role in shaping the Middle East since October 1956, everything that happened after the Suez crisis goes to the account of the USA and Russia.