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German Cities Can Ban Diesel Cars, Court Rules (cnet.com)
A German court has ruled that cities in Germany are allowed to enact bans on diesel vehicles, Reuters reports. It's unlikely that bans will magically appear across the country overnight, but not everyone in the country is happy about this decision. From a report: Environmentalists might be happy about the possibility of banning some of the road's dirtiest cars, but owners and right-leaning groups are not. Reuters reports that some politicians believe this decision could disenfranchise a large swath of car owners across the country, many of whom likely can't afford to immediately replace a vehicle.
The end goals of these bans is to force all-electric cars, then force everyone on public transit because owning an electric car is at this point harder than internal combustion one.
It snows heavily for 4+ months of the year where I live. Yet, municipality is converting roads and parking spaces into bike lanes, that are unused and unusable a portion of the year due to snow. To me, this is politically driven insanity.
No food for you!
Have gnu, will travel.
Germany has a civil law system. Judges merely interpret the law as written, they do not set precedents. Unless there's some German national law specifically prohibiting the banning of previously sold products, there's not much a German judge can do to block a legislature from passing such a ban - the legislative body holds ultimate power. It's not like a common law system where previous court decisions about ownership rights, resale rights, and prohibitions on ex-post facto laws would come into play because they're similar, even if they didn't specifically mention banning a previously sold product.
how dare they spend money on snow removal equipment that's only used 4+ months of the year. It's a conspiracy, I tell you.
It would seem likely that any bans could easily be phased in with warnings - for example, this small area will be off limits next year, a larger area the year after, etc.
This would give most people who both need to drive in those areas and have a diesel to try to sell/exchange their car. I realize that this would probably cause problems for some people, but so does nitrogen oxide which seems to be over the EU limits in a bunch of urban areas in Germany.
Building a new car is more polluting than the running an old car, and the economic activity required to afford that new car also burns more energy, with its pollution, than the car will save.
Cars will move to electrics pretty soon now - as the old fleet ages out the electric replacements will be too cost-effective to not buy - only gearheads will still want liquid fuel vehicles.
But in the meantime, some wealthy politicians and their wealthy friends can ban the cars that their staff people drive (because the wealthy people don't pay them enough) so that they don't have to breathe their "poor-people" pollution. The politicians will hide behind the fig leaf of environmentalism because just enough people aren't educated enough to call them on their ruling-class bullshit.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Your right to pollute ends at the tip of my nose. If you want to drive a POS that generates choking, unhealthy pollution, move to a city or country that is willing to tolerate it. I'm not, and many like me are not.
The point is that diesel cars crap up other people's living spaces.
This is an emotional knee-jerk (and diesel has PR problem). Modern internal combustion engines (diesel or otherwise) are not significant source of pollution when emission control equipment is functioning as intended.
Diesel cars have far worse levels of local pollution generated. Modern petrol cars generate CO2 but the exhaust is extremely clean.
One important distinction here is in the type of regulation. If any ban is as simple as the summary suggests--diesel-based vehicles are to be prohibited--then it's a bad regulation.
The reason is the distinction is between rule-based and standards-based regulations.
Bottom-line: any city that passes a rule to this effect should make clear that if someone designs a diesel engine with extremely clean exhaust, (or perhaps even if it can show lower total lifetime emissions for a vehicle) it can still be used.
Real lawyers write in C++