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Efforts like these just confuse me. At first I thought It would be any cars on the road by 2040, in which case this is enough notice, since the warning gives co

Efforts like these just confuse me. At first I thought It would be any cars on the road by 2040, in which case this is enough notice, since the warning gives consumers enough time to plan (22 years). But outside of a few strange edge cases like specialised cars, what's the point of banning them by 2040? Electric cars are going to dominate sales within 10 years. At scale, they are cheaper to fuel, cheaper to maintain, have an acceptably high top speed (anything over 160km/h isn't really needed and Telsas can go 250km/h), a better acceleration curve, they are better for human health (no particulates), they are better for the natural environment (no oil spills), they are better to fight global warming. The only thing that they are worse at is fuel up time and range. And if either of those problems are solved, both of them effectively are, since fast fuel up gets us a longer effective range and extremely long range (say 2000km) makes fill up time irrelevant. The writing is on the wall. Fossil fuels are going to be completely replaced very quickly. By taking aggressive steps to ban non-electric vehicles sooner both the environment AND our economy will be better off since we'll gain an advantage in the new industries. In Canada we're still building oil pipelines, it's madness. It's like building a whale blubber processing plant after the early commercialisation of crude oil.

grecy 9y ago
> In Canada we're still building oil pipelines, it's madness. In Australia too the politicians keep droning on about "clean coal" and trying as hard as they can to prop-up existing coal-power-plant-as-a-license-to-print-money. My attitude is, "Who cares"? Let the dinosaurs die their out-dated death while the world moves on underneath them.
djhworld 9y ago
> what's the point of banning them by 2040? It sets a deadline. Future parliaments can change it as they see fit, but I think the UK government had to say something otherwise they'd be contravening agreements made in the past. Like you said, within 10 years electric cars sales will probably become the norm anyway, but I guess from a policy perspective it's signalling to manufacturers and the general public that they have 22 years to make the shift.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
  > Future parliaments can change it as they see fit, And that's exactly why this is a dodge: It doesn't affect the current administration, and if a future administration doesn't like it, they can just change it. it's a classic maneuver of the "kick the can down the road while pretending to make policy" kind.

grecy 9y ago

> In Canada we're still building oil pipelines, it's madness. In Australia too the politicians keep droning on about "clean coal" and trying as hard as they can to prop-up existing coal-power-plant-as-a-license-to-print-money. My attitude is, "Who cares"? Let the dinosaurs die their out-dated death while the world moves on underneath them.

djhworld 9y ago

> what's the point of banning them by 2040? It sets a deadline. Future parliaments can change it as they see fit, but I think the UK government had to say something otherwise they'd be contravening agreements made in the past. Like you said, within 10 years electric cars sales will probably become the norm anyway, but I guess from a policy perspective it's signalling to manufacturers and the general public that they have 22 years to make the shift.

SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
> Future parliaments can change it as they see fit, And that's exactly why this is a dodge: It doesn't affect the current administration, and if a future administration doesn't like it, they can just change it. it's a classic maneuver of the "kick the can down the road while pretending to make policy" kind.