Slashdot Mirror
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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."
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Expect war and strife in the Middle East. In other words: same shit, different decade.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
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
Set to take effect in 24 years. It's just posing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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'.
Not only did President Trump get us out of an expensive yet worthless non-binding global agreement, he also got a commitment from nearly 350 local mayors to keep their carbon reduction goals and has made France step up their reduction in emissions. Liberals will refuse to admit it but President Trump has been one of the most effective leaders of reduced global fossil fuel emissions.
Thank you President Trump!
Except that Middle East has much larger pile of by-then aging modern weapons that has a used-by date, and historically and culturally speaking the countries are much more violent. The silver lining being that some of the more backward, dysfunctional monarchies finally cease to get propped up by oil, thus ending the major source of funding for terrorism.
Why not let things unfold naturally if possible?
Because experience shows that the free market **NEVER** finds the most ecologically-sound solution.
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".
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'll enjoy watching this too.
Can someone tell me something? Will an electric car burn like a gasoline car? I'm sure I'll find out eventually but it's something I'd like to know.
Google tells me lithium burns with a red flame, copper with a blue or green flame. I'll keep that in mind as I watch the news.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
When you can run your gas car without contributing to the pollution and catastrophic warming of my planet, then you drive whatever you want without regard for my desires.
Since that's not possible, society (in the form of government) has to negotiate limits that everyone can hopefully live with.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Trump doubles down with mandate: all new cars must be powered by coal slurry by 2030.
Why not let things unfold naturally if possible?
Great idea! We should have done that with leaded gas so we could all enjoy a nice, natural, high crime rate. Or asbestos. Or that accidentally poisonous isomer of some vitamin or the other that caused all those miscarriages many decades ago. Or hell, why limit this to bans? Let's go all natural on everything. Bring back the polio and measles and mange. Ah those were the good old days.
Someone had to do it.
There are a million things you're not allowed to buy. Your freedom of choice is basically an illusion. For instance, you're not allowed to buy a car that violates all kinds of safety rules. You can't buy many dangerous chemicals. You can't buy a bazooka.
Also, that's a great story. I'm so happy for you. I have no idea what you're trying to prove with it. yard power tools are not a significant source of pollution, so they haven't been targeted. If the point is that the market sometimes eventually selects products that are better for everyone's well being, uh, okay. But it doesn't say anything with respect to if it selects quickly enough, nor consistently enough. Your faith in the market is just that - faith that it solves problems that it demonstrably doesn't always solve.
"Old man yells at systemd"
That is only for the US, look to the less rich countries in Europe and around the world. Suddenly the average car ages go up 15,18, 20+ years. if third world countries can keep cars going 20+ years, what is with the US wanting to just throw them away?
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.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
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.
Corrected link to an ethnic map of the Middle East.
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.
Even if they run out of money for cheap bullets they'll just hack at each other with swords.
This is a religious war that's been going on for a thousand years or so, certainly hundreds of years. This will not end soon unless they succeed in killing themselves. If they just kill one faction off then they'll just export their warring ways.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
That's cute to think that they can just ban them. They'll have to boil this frog or there will be riots. Phase in taxes or something. Or, they simply think that the markets will make electric cars more attractive by then, in which case this proclamation is just virtue signalling.
(I just realized the hilarity of using a frog joke when discussing France. Anyone else find that funny or is my insomnia making everything seem funny?)
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Saudi Arabia has long recognized this and started massively into solar. Watch electrek.co and "Fully Charged" by Red Dwarf's Kryton to follow these developments.
What if I get 50% + 1 people to vote that we get to keep our petrol burning cars? Let me guess, you like democracy so long as the majority agrees with you.
I've seen the polls of what people in the USA are concerned about and (in no particular order here) it's their job, terrorism, clean air and water, your job, fuel prices, food prices. Global warming was at or near the bottom of the list, right next to their ability to get a good cell phone signal while they drive.
A lot of these issues currently have solutions in opposition to global warming solutions. If people want to fight global warming AND have low prices on food and fuel, jobs for everyone, clean air and water, then they need to get over their irrational fear of nuclear power.
There must be a lot of insanity in France if they think that they can both reduce nuclear power use while reducing their reliance on coal and oil. I've seen the math and the only way to do that now is with a bunch of solar collectors in Africa and wires run under the sea to France. Right now Africa is not a stable place and if they expect to meet this goal then they need to start building solar panels now.
Do they plan to invade Northern Africa to get their sun? That would be an interesting turn of events, would it not?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Actually the Hutu and Tutsi one is worse - since no such ethnicities existed prior to colonization. The French literally just went and declared the taller people a different (and less inferior) race and treated them that way so long that it got ingrained in the local culture.
Mind you - that same thing about drawing borders without any consideration for the local population happened in Africa, and a great deal of the problems post-colonial Africa has had have stemmed from the fact that borders cut through ethnic lines and combine together unrelated tribes in other places because the borders were based on the internal competition between European countries, not on the traditional borders between different African cultures.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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...
reason defies logic
The problem with Venezuela (one of them, at least) is a funny combination of populism and ignorance. The drop in oil prices is marginal compared to the political mess they're into. I don't need a podcast to tell me that, I live next door to them.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
The drop in oil prices has everything to do with the current political mess in Venezuela. When oil prices went up over $100/bbl, they used the extra revenue to increase social services. When oil prices went back down to $40/bbl, they refused to cut back on those social services. Instead, the government started printing more money to pay for those services (effectively stealing from its citizens' savings). That started a massive inflationary spiral which destroyed any semblance of stability in their economy.
The government's attempt to fix it by freezing the exchange rate of the Bolivar (because they don't believe in market forces - that's why you see the exchange rate graph decrease in a stair-step) just led to more economic chaos as Venezuelan companies doing import/export were no longer able to get anyone to take their laughably mis-priced money. Thus their non-oil foreign trade mostly dried up as well. The bickering about the best way to solve this situation (hint: cut back on outlays for social services to match actual government revenue) is what's led to the current political mess.
This is the playbook of what's going to happen to Middle Eastern countries which built most of their wealth on oil. Most of them are using their oil revenue to fund social services to keep the masses content while the ruling class (usually a family) does whatever the hell they want. When their oil revenue dries up, they're going to be forced to make a difficult choice between continuing those social services and suffering Venezuela's fate, or cutting them to preserve economic stability but then having to face the full wrath of the rioting masses for the first time in decades. (Note that some Middle Eastern countries have little to no oil revenue - e.g. Jordan.)