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This is where the blame really lies: "European nations — including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Austria — had been cutting taxes on diesel car pu

This is where the blame really lies: "European nations — including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Austria — had been cutting taxes on diesel car purchases and diesel fuel to promote sales". The big lesson here is regulators should never ever pick winners from specific technologies.

jacquesm 7y ago
I think your conclusion is not supported by the premise. Yes, regulators fucked up. But that does not mean they are wrong all the time. And besides, it wasn't the regulators that cheated, it was the car manufacturers. The worst you can really accuse them of is lax oversight.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
legitster 7y ago
This is something that worries me about current green initiatives. We throw down subsidies for electric cars, but they still fuel on coal fired plants. Or all the money we throw away to make ethanol. It would be so much better if we just started taxing externalities like carbon or fertilizer runoff and let markets decide the tech to do it organically. But let's not let the car oligopoly completely off the hook. At some point they all took that step over the line.
- mobilefriendly 7y ago
  Ethanol is not a green initiative, it is a subsidy program for corn growers. There's no serious green group that argues for ethanol from corn. The "green" aspect is just marketing by the corn lobby.
- marcyb5st 7y ago
  I think it is still a good thing to subsidize electric cars for several reasons: 1) even if powered 100% by coal plants, these plants have an higher efficiency than cars' internal combustion engines, especially if you consider the energy/co2 emissions due to the distillation process of petrol/diesel. Moreover, having a huge central plant means that you can install heavy and big filters and possibly re-capture some of that co2. You can't do this with cars 2) not all the power comes from coal plants, some from nuclear, some from natural gas, and even from renewables sources 3) when we finally crack nuclear fusion / thorium reactors / we found a way to store the surplus of renewables for underperforming times in a good way (like with molten salt https://newatlas.com/mit-molten-salt-battery-membrane/53085/ https://newatlas.com/mit-molten-salt-battery-membrane/53085/ ) we can be carbon free from as soon as these technologies spread, without having to way for consumers to change cars 4) Pushing people to use newer technologies means that companies will spend more in R&D on this subject. Imagine if someone finally invents a battery with energy capacity of 5x current Li-ion. A car like the model 3 will have ~ 1500 kms of range ... Of course there are points in favor of petrol/diesel cars, like the fact that producing current batteries is not that good for the environment, but if we don't invest on this we'll never have the incentive to overcome these problems.
  - legitster 7y ago
    > "when we finally crack nuclear fusion / thorium reactors / we found a way to store the surplus of renewables" > "Imagine if someone finally invents a battery with energy capacity of 5x ". 3 & 4 are exactly examples of the original point I was making. We shouldn't plan out decisions today based on the lottery machine of future discoveries. None of these advancements are guaranteed. In the 1910s, steam power was the most promising tech for the development of the automobile. It's hard to imagine a world where we could have just dumped enough R&D into steam power to overcome the natural shortcomings.
    - qtplatypus 7y ago
      We did. Our coal and nuclear power plants are very efficient steam engines.
  - nopzor 7y ago
    > A car like the model 3 will have ~ 1500 kms of range more likely it'll have ~ 700km of range, but only cost half the price!
  - Arbalest 7y ago
    > even if powered 100% by coal plants, these plants have an higher efficiency than cars' internal combustion engines Yes they have incredible thermal efficiency, but two things come to mind: The grid does not, and coal has particular difficulty in controlling particulate emissions. This is particularly true of brown coal, which has a very high water content. Just to be particularly frustrating, coal is not distilled the way diesel is (which is famous for particulate emissions) so it tends to have other stuff like excessive sulphur. Though in that case, that stuff ends up in the bunker oil that goes in big ships.
djaychela 7y ago
I think this doesn't take into account the reasons behind this (in the UK at least, where I live). Tax cuts were made because CO2 emissions were viewed as being the problem, and Diesels are more fuel efficient than an equivalent-power petrol engine, hence lower CO2 emissions. It wasn't that the regulators were 'picking winners from specific technologies' as you claim, but they were favouring any vehicle with a low CO2 emission per kilometer. If that was achievable by a petrol car, then it was rewarded; low emission petrol cars got the same break, but they're inherently less efficient due to the lower compression ratio of a petrol engine.
- donjoe 7y ago
  ... whereas less CO2 emissions caused by Diesel engines is a misconception, too. Diesel comes with a higher energy density which means there are more CO2 emissions per burned liter of Diesel in comparison to gas. Burning a liter of Diesel emits 2.6kg of CO2, gas 'only' emits 2.3kg of CO2 [1]. Plus, a Diesel engine is heavier compared to a gas engine with comparable specs. [1] https://www1.wdr.de/wissen/technik/kohlenstoffdioxid-sprit-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/wissen/technik/kohlenstoffdioxid-sprit-1...
  - scythe 7y ago
    This comparison is wrong. You want CO2 per distance, not CO2 per liter. From these numbers if it could go either way. If the diesel engine gets 10% more distance/liter then it's worse than an Otto engine, but if it gets 20% more distance/liter then it's cleaner than an Otto engine. CO2/liter tells us very little. However, what is certain is that the CO2 savings from diesel is small and certainly less than 50%. That's not going to get us where we need to go in terms of carbon emissions.
    - donjoe 7y ago
      I wouldn't say it's per se wrong. The tax is based on a per liter basis and not on a per distance/liter basis. If you'd want to tax CO2 emissions, Diesel would need a higher tax rate than gas since it'll emit more CO2 per burned liter.

jacquesm 7y ago

I think your conclusion is not supported by the premise. Yes, regulators fucked up. But that does not mean they are wrong all the time. And besides, it wasn't the regulators that cheated, it was the car manufacturers. The worst you can really accuse them of is lax oversight.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

legitster 7y ago

This is something that worries me about current green initiatives. We throw down subsidies for electric cars, but they still fuel on coal fired plants. Or all the money we throw away to make ethanol. It would be so much better if we just started taxing externalities like carbon or fertilizer runoff and let markets decide the tech to do it organically. But let's not let the car oligopoly completely off the hook. At some point they all took that step over the line.

mobilefriendly 7y ago
Ethanol is not a green initiative, it is a subsidy program for corn growers. There's no serious green group that argues for ethanol from corn. The "green" aspect is just marketing by the corn lobby.
marcyb5st 7y ago
I think it is still a good thing to subsidize electric cars for several reasons: 1) even if powered 100% by coal plants, these plants have an higher efficiency than cars' internal combustion engines, especially if you consider the energy/co2 emissions due to the distillation process of petrol/diesel. Moreover, having a huge central plant means that you can install heavy and big filters and possibly re-capture some of that co2. You can't do this with cars 2) not all the power comes from coal plants, some from nuclear, some from natural gas, and even from renewables sources 3) when we finally crack nuclear fusion / thorium reactors / we found a way to store the surplus of renewables for underperforming times in a good way (like with molten salt https://newatlas.com/mit-molten-salt-battery-membrane/53085/ https://newatlas.com/mit-molten-salt-battery-membrane/53085/ ) we can be carbon free from as soon as these technologies spread, without having to way for consumers to change cars 4) Pushing people to use newer technologies means that companies will spend more in R&D on this subject. Imagine if someone finally invents a battery with energy capacity of 5x current Li-ion. A car like the model 3 will have ~ 1500 kms of range ... Of course there are points in favor of petrol/diesel cars, like the fact that producing current batteries is not that good for the environment, but if we don't invest on this we'll never have the incentive to overcome these problems.
- legitster 7y ago
  > "when we finally crack nuclear fusion / thorium reactors / we found a way to store the surplus of renewables" > "Imagine if someone finally invents a battery with energy capacity of 5x ". 3 & 4 are exactly examples of the original point I was making. We shouldn't plan out decisions today based on the lottery machine of future discoveries. None of these advancements are guaranteed. In the 1910s, steam power was the most promising tech for the development of the automobile. It's hard to imagine a world where we could have just dumped enough R&D into steam power to overcome the natural shortcomings.
  - qtplatypus 7y ago
    We did. Our coal and nuclear power plants are very efficient steam engines.
- nopzor 7y ago
  > A car like the model 3 will have ~ 1500 kms of range more likely it'll have ~ 700km of range, but only cost half the price!
- Arbalest 7y ago
  > even if powered 100% by coal plants, these plants have an higher efficiency than cars' internal combustion engines Yes they have incredible thermal efficiency, but two things come to mind: The grid does not, and coal has particular difficulty in controlling particulate emissions. This is particularly true of brown coal, which has a very high water content. Just to be particularly frustrating, coal is not distilled the way diesel is (which is famous for particulate emissions) so it tends to have other stuff like excessive sulphur. Though in that case, that stuff ends up in the bunker oil that goes in big ships.

djaychela 7y ago

I think this doesn't take into account the reasons behind this (in the UK at least, where I live). Tax cuts were made because CO2 emissions were viewed as being the problem, and Diesels are more fuel efficient than an equivalent-power petrol engine, hence lower CO2 emissions. It wasn't that the regulators were 'picking winners from specific technologies' as you claim, but they were favouring any vehicle with a low CO2 emission per kilometer. If that was achievable by a petrol car, then it was rewarded; low emission petrol cars got the same break, but they're inherently less efficient due to the lower compression ratio of a petrol engine.

donjoe 7y ago
... whereas less CO2 emissions caused by Diesel engines is a misconception, too. Diesel comes with a higher energy density which means there are more CO2 emissions per burned liter of Diesel in comparison to gas. Burning a liter of Diesel emits 2.6kg of CO2, gas 'only' emits 2.3kg of CO2 [1]. Plus, a Diesel engine is heavier compared to a gas engine with comparable specs. [1] https://www1.wdr.de/wissen/technik/kohlenstoffdioxid-sprit-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/wissen/technik/kohlenstoffdioxid-sprit-1...
- scythe 7y ago
  This comparison is wrong. You want CO2 per distance, not CO2 per liter. From these numbers if it could go either way. If the diesel engine gets 10% more distance/liter then it's worse than an Otto engine, but if it gets 20% more distance/liter then it's cleaner than an Otto engine. CO2/liter tells us very little. However, what is certain is that the CO2 savings from diesel is small and certainly less than 50%. That's not going to get us where we need to go in terms of carbon emissions.
  - donjoe 7y ago
    I wouldn't say it's per se wrong. The tax is based on a per liter basis and not on a per distance/liter basis. If you'd want to tax CO2 emissions, Diesel would need a higher tax rate than gas since it'll emit more CO2 per burned liter.