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This perfectly epitomises the uk (and the rest of the worlds) attitude to global warming: * it's a non binding commitment to do something but not for at least

This perfectly epitomises the uk (and the rest of the worlds) attitude to global warming: * it's a non binding commitment to do something but not for at least a decade * it's not enough even if it does happen * it will be too late by then (it probably already is for anything but drastic action) * it's totally at the whim of future governments who will be no more willing to spend the money/time/popularity than the current unwilling government * people will eat it up with a spoon and act like this is a real thing and a sign of progress and a victory This is the same as my committing to start my diet, by giving up one specific thing, but not for a decade, after my doctor told me I gave 6m to lose weight or die. And to celebrate I'll eat two pizzas and 4 litres of soda, for breakfast.

anovikov 6y ago
But on the other hand, this IS indeed a super drastic action and we can't expect any nation on Earth apart from possibly, a few city-states like Singapore, to do as much in the same time frame. Petrol cars will be mainstay of transportation for about 40-50 years and will dominate new car sales for at least 20-30 years depending on the country. Anything but classic petrol and diesel cars will still hold tiny market shares 10 years down the road almost everywhere. I mean, the climate change situation is hopeless. Some measures may be taken in the name of it, and they are important, but they are mainly a side action: for example, they do a lot to suppress oil-funded dictatorships like Russia or Saudi Arabia - people won't support the measures if they were directed at that openly, but if it's about climate, they are a lot easier to sell. But, we have to just admit that the global warming will proceed and probably faster than even the worst estimates predict, and just plan accordingly out of this assumption. It is too profitable to mine and use fossil fuels, any large nation trying to stop doing so will be competed out of existence by those who don't (and they will have way lower energy efficiency so will displace your uncompetitive products with theirs, in the end INCREASING overall emissions), and largest polluters are nuclear powers so you can't even force them to stop by military action. Just see where the climate will stand when 3x of the current extractable reserves of fossil fuels are burned (because technology will develop and a lot of new reserves will become available which are now not). And plan for that level of global temperatures, precipitation and sea levels. It will happen, and the nations that win are those who plan in advance.
- perfunctory 6y ago
  > we can't expect any nation on Earth apart from possibly, a few city-states like Singapore, to do as much in the same time frame. Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  You are way off. It took about 15 years to go from cities dominated by horse carriages to them being dominated by cars. It took longer in agriculture and rural areas. But the shift to electrical vehicles is trivial in comparison. Technically and economically we could easily prohibit new fossil fuelled cars by 2025. Sun and wind power is already much cheaper to install than coal powered plants, and once sun and wind power is up the energy is almost free. Fossil fuel companies are currently struggling, just from this simple economy. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-motor-vehicle-1917-slide-show/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-motor-vehicle...
  - anovikov 6y ago
    In the field of electricity generation, sure. Technology is there, apart from storage technology. But, given still higher costs and range anxiety, it will be very difficult to convince most consumers to buy electric cars. It will be most probably only generational shift: people born before ~1990 will still buy petrol cars till they die out, and younger generations will progressively shift, having different habits. It will take whole century to fully switch to electric vehicles in developed countries - and lack of reliable electric grid will make it in places like Africa even slower. An even harder, and even larger part of the story is industrial heat (needs to be very reliable and cheap), and residential heating (needs to be very, very cheap and available in large volumes). No good non-fossil solutions here exist.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      There is a HN article about using iron for industrial heat. The only downside is that transportation is expensive. If it can be electrolyzed on site it's going to be a game changer.
djmobley 6y ago
I think you’ve completely missed the point of what is a very reasonable and forward-thinking signalling exercise. You cannot have sudden cliff-edges in policies (like banning the sale of new ICE vehicles) that would put thousands, if not millions of people out of jobs. You need to send signals like this to the market well in advance so they can invest and plan ahead.
- brtkdotse 6y ago
  > You cannot have sudden cliff-edges in policies Brexit has entered the chat
  - newlytread 6y ago
    I wouldn’t call anything about Brexit sudden or well designed
    - rusk 6y ago
      I guess it's a slow toppling over a cliff edge. Like at the end of the Italian Job.
  - Normal_gaussian 6y ago
    This is a perfect example. Talked about by the forces that enacted it as early as 2010, the Brexit referendum happens in 2016, and leaving the EU has been gradually happening since then.
    - crispyporkbites 6y ago
      No, there’s 6 weeks to go and there’s still no trade agreement in place, nothing material has happened in the last 4 years. Any business that imports/exports has no clue what will happen on 1st Jan. But yea I can get a blue passport now. What a great thing to waste years on.
      - brigandish 6y ago
conjectures 6y ago
On this specific issue, what more could be done, really? Bring the ban to 2025? 2022? One can't simply expect mass production to switch that fast. UK has already tightened emissions rules on vehicles and VED taxes more polluting cars more heavily. They could, and probably will, ratchet things more. The right response on this policy is to say: great thanks Boris, you can clearly see the potential in green tech, now could you do X, Y, and Z too? Yes, the government expects people to lap this up. Which is a reason why they do it. If they see electric cars both piss off the Daily Mail camp and yet are still criticised as worthless by environmentalists then we're not giving them the right incentives to take further measures.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- terryf 6y ago
  The only thing that has a chance of working is thinking about it a bit differently - governments should heavily subsidize building solar energy plants. On the scale of "much more than we need". Then they should also heavily subsidize carbon capture and possibly also tech to turn it into liquid fuels again. Getting petrol cars off the road is just not going to happen on the time scale it's needed. If the 10 years until the ban would be spent building enough solar, carbon capture and fuel generation, we'd be in a much better state. We'd literally have a knob that controls the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
  - conjectures 6y ago
    They're building one of the biggest solar farms in Europe just down the road from me. The local Green party campaigned against it, on environmental grounds. Really, it seems like it's impossible to please the environmental lobby. As much as I want this stuff to happen I can imagine a politician thinking, "screw them, they'll only whinge anyway."
- davidhbolton 6y ago
  Why does China get a free pass? It's the worlds largest miner of coal and is building many new coal fired power stations. For instance. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/riozim-seals-3-billion-zimbabwe-coal-plant-deal-with-china https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/riozim-se... and https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-will-china-build-hundreds-of-new-coal-plants-in-the-2020s https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-will-china-build-hundre...
barnacled 6y ago
This comment perfectly epitomises the 'climate crisis' extinction rebellion Greta Thunberg school of response to climate issues. Firstly - any response to climate change that does not include China and really India and other emerging economies too is more or less useless. Why should we deny such countries the benefits of full industrialisation? Secondly - while in some respects you are correct, looking at CO2 numbers some kind of drastic action seems to be required, it also leaves unanswered the question of 'at what cost'. During the covid19 situation we've seen the impact of shutting down parts of the economy on GDP. That naturally always translates into deaths, and the kind of economic impact such drastic action would entail would likely run into millions of deaths, many of them far away in poorer nations receiving less govt aid (as with covid!) I think the whole 'nothing is enough the world will end!!' mentality does nothing but put those who are inclined to care into a state of deep depression and anxiety and those who are inclined to deny climate change into a better position to argue that the other side are being ridiculous. It does NOT help. The correct approach is a practical middle ground where we try to do what we can. In any case this govt response does somewhat epitomise the 'climate hysterics' mentality in that it is hugely impractical, ignores many questions of trade-offs and impact as if there were none to be answered and is unilateral enough to be meaningless in the wider global context. Keep in mind that if one country decides to take drastic action which tanks its economy, do you think other countries are likely to follow suit or rather elect govts that entirely unwind all and any climate action?
- ako 6y ago
  Not dealing with global warming will also lead to "the kind of economic impact such drastic action would entail would likely run into millions of deaths, many of them far away in poorer nations"
  - barnacled 6y ago
    Did I suggest not addressing it? It's entirely this dismissive attitude that harms the cause. This 'all or nothing' attitude that reminds me of the gun control issue in the US. Since you've ignored most of what I said there, let me reduce the surface area of the discussion and ask 1 thing: Let's assume the UK does everything the climate 'activists' request of them, and this results in an economic depression and unprecedented unemployment and poverty - do you think this increases or decreases the likelihood of other countries following suit?
danielrpa 6y ago
Agreed. If the government was serious about starting a program for reducing emissions from internal combustion engines, it could start by gradually increasing the gasoline tax until it became prohibitively expensive to buy an internal combustion engine car in 2030. In your analogy, the diet would start on day 1 with an objective reduction in sweets, even if not 100% quite yet. BTW, I'm not saying that the government should increase the tax, I'm just saying that a concrete action in the present would go a long way towards building credibility.
- AlphaSite 6y ago
  This has the side effect of punishing those too poor to afford a petrol car, instead they can increase the cost of purchasing a petrol car, which directly taxes the more wealthy (new car buyers).
JimDabell 6y ago
I think you’re being a bit unfair here. The UK has made good progress in moving away from fossil fuels in recent years. As of June this year, the UK was generating more power from renewables than from fossil fuels. A decade ago hardly any power was being generated from renewables. The UK has gone months without burning coal this year, and plans to decommission the last three coal power plants in the next five years. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52973089 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52973089 These aren’t empty promises, this is solid progress.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  One of the things in these proposals that isn't as eye-catching as "ban petrol cars" was investment and subsidies to get to 4x wind power generation. Right now it's windy and the UK gets about 10GW of electricity from wind turbines (maybe a bit more) the past few days. But at 4x that would be 40GW of electricity, which would actually be enough to just power the whole country on a typical weekday evening (as the sun goes down, day time place of work usage isn't all stopped yet but home usage is picking up). Now, obviously it isn't always windy, but on the other hand it also isn't always a weekday evening. At 3am on a Sunday in June the country is ticking over at 20GW, and the weather doesn't care so your wind turbines might be kicking out 40GW anyway. We need to store or export that. That's a key challenge for the next decade.
- pjc50 6y ago
  The weird thing is that hardly anyone seems willing to take credit for this success.
truthwhisperer 6y ago
maybe we should just focus on less people on this planet right?
LockAndLol 6y ago
The responses to your comment are the epitome of our society: This is fine. We're fine. We'll be just fine. Even among people who don't deny climate change this complacent attitude prevails. It's why I believe this video presents everything nicely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8
flurdy 6y ago
> This is the same as my committing to start my diet, by giving up one specific thing, but not for a decade, after my doctor told me I gave 6m to lose weight or die. And to celebrate I'll eat two pizzas and 4 litres of soda, for breakfast. Great analogy. But to be honest politicians don't make drastic changes as they fear they will loose the next election. But I do believe they under estimate people's interest in dealing with climate change. Then again Brexit happened and people vote for Boris and Trump so what do I really know what the electorate wants.
DarkmSparks 6y ago
Global warming here is just for cover up. IMHO The real reason they dont want petrol cars in the UK is because the North Sea Oil is just about all gone.
asenk 6y ago
There is no "uk (and the rest of the worlds) attitude to global warming". There's s a small group of rogue countries like US trying to do their best to burn the planet while undermining climate agreements and not doing anything about climate change at 16+ tons of annual CO2 per capita, while some others are doing a whole lot, for example UK has pretty about halved their emissions from already a lot lower starting point, from 10.3 to 5.6 tons in the last 40 years.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

anovikov 6y ago

But on the other hand, this IS indeed a super drastic action and we can't expect any nation on Earth apart from possibly, a few city-states like Singapore, to do as much in the same time frame. Petrol cars will be mainstay of transportation for about 40-50 years and will dominate new car sales for at least 20-30 years depending on the country. Anything but classic petrol and diesel cars will still hold tiny market shares 10 years down the road almost everywhere. I mean, the climate change situation is hopeless. Some measures may be taken in the name of it, and they are important, but they are mainly a side action: for example, they do a lot to suppress oil-funded dictatorships like Russia or Saudi Arabia - people won't support the measures if they were directed at that openly, but if it's about climate, they are a lot easier to sell. But, we have to just admit that the global warming will proceed and probably faster than even the worst estimates predict, and just plan accordingly out of this assumption. It is too profitable to mine and use fossil fuels, any large nation trying to stop doing so will be competed out of existence by those who don't (and they will have way lower energy efficiency so will displace your uncompetitive products with theirs, in the end INCREASING overall emissions), and largest polluters are nuclear powers so you can't even force them to stop by military action. Just see where the climate will stand when 3x of the current extractable reserves of fossil fuels are burned (because technology will develop and a lot of new reserves will become available which are now not). And plan for that level of global temperatures, precipitation and sea levels. It will happen, and the nations that win are those who plan in advance.

perfunctory 6y ago
> we can't expect any nation on Earth apart from possibly, a few city-states like Singapore, to do as much in the same time frame. Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
Ma8ee 6y ago
You are way off. It took about 15 years to go from cities dominated by horse carriages to them being dominated by cars. It took longer in agriculture and rural areas. But the shift to electrical vehicles is trivial in comparison. Technically and economically we could easily prohibit new fossil fuelled cars by 2025. Sun and wind power is already much cheaper to install than coal powered plants, and once sun and wind power is up the energy is almost free. Fossil fuel companies are currently struggling, just from this simple economy. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-motor-vehicle-1917-slide-show/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-motor-vehicle...
- anovikov 6y ago
  In the field of electricity generation, sure. Technology is there, apart from storage technology. But, given still higher costs and range anxiety, it will be very difficult to convince most consumers to buy electric cars. It will be most probably only generational shift: people born before ~1990 will still buy petrol cars till they die out, and younger generations will progressively shift, having different habits. It will take whole century to fully switch to electric vehicles in developed countries - and lack of reliable electric grid will make it in places like Africa even slower. An even harder, and even larger part of the story is industrial heat (needs to be very reliable and cheap), and residential heating (needs to be very, very cheap and available in large volumes). No good non-fossil solutions here exist.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    There is a HN article about using iron for industrial heat. The only downside is that transportation is expensive. If it can be electrolyzed on site it's going to be a game changer.

djmobley 6y ago

I think you’ve completely missed the point of what is a very reasonable and forward-thinking signalling exercise. You cannot have sudden cliff-edges in policies (like banning the sale of new ICE vehicles) that would put thousands, if not millions of people out of jobs. You need to send signals like this to the market well in advance so they can invest and plan ahead.

brtkdotse 6y ago
> You cannot have sudden cliff-edges in policies Brexit has entered the chat
- newlytread 6y ago
  I wouldn’t call anything about Brexit sudden or well designed
  - rusk 6y ago
    I guess it's a slow toppling over a cliff edge. Like at the end of the Italian Job.
- Normal_gaussian 6y ago
  This is a perfect example. Talked about by the forces that enacted it as early as 2010, the Brexit referendum happens in 2016, and leaving the EU has been gradually happening since then.
  - crispyporkbites 6y ago
    No, there’s 6 weeks to go and there’s still no trade agreement in place, nothing material has happened in the last 4 years. Any business that imports/exports has no clue what will happen on 1st Jan. But yea I can get a blue passport now. What a great thing to waste years on.
    - brigandish 6y ago

conjectures 6y ago

On this specific issue, what more could be done, really? Bring the ban to 2025? 2022? One can't simply expect mass production to switch that fast. UK has already tightened emissions rules on vehicles and VED taxes more polluting cars more heavily. They could, and probably will, ratchet things more. The right response on this policy is to say: great thanks Boris, you can clearly see the potential in green tech, now could you do X, Y, and Z too? Yes, the government expects people to lap this up. Which is a reason why they do it. If they see electric cars both piss off the Daily Mail camp and yet are still criticised as worthless by environmentalists then we're not giving them the right incentives to take further measures.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
terryf 6y ago
The only thing that has a chance of working is thinking about it a bit differently - governments should heavily subsidize building solar energy plants. On the scale of "much more than we need". Then they should also heavily subsidize carbon capture and possibly also tech to turn it into liquid fuels again. Getting petrol cars off the road is just not going to happen on the time scale it's needed. If the 10 years until the ban would be spent building enough solar, carbon capture and fuel generation, we'd be in a much better state. We'd literally have a knob that controls the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
- conjectures 6y ago
  They're building one of the biggest solar farms in Europe just down the road from me. The local Green party campaigned against it, on environmental grounds. Really, it seems like it's impossible to please the environmental lobby. As much as I want this stuff to happen I can imagine a politician thinking, "screw them, they'll only whinge anyway."
davidhbolton 6y ago
Why does China get a free pass? It's the worlds largest miner of coal and is building many new coal fired power stations. For instance. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/riozim-seals-3-billion-zimbabwe-coal-plant-deal-with-china https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/riozim-se... and https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-will-china-build-hundreds-of-new-coal-plants-in-the-2020s https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-will-china-build-hundre...

barnacled 6y ago

This comment perfectly epitomises the 'climate crisis' extinction rebellion Greta Thunberg school of response to climate issues. Firstly - any response to climate change that does not include China and really India and other emerging economies too is more or less useless. Why should we deny such countries the benefits of full industrialisation? Secondly - while in some respects you are correct, looking at CO2 numbers some kind of drastic action seems to be required, it also leaves unanswered the question of 'at what cost'. During the covid19 situation we've seen the impact of shutting down parts of the economy on GDP. That naturally always translates into deaths, and the kind of economic impact such drastic action would entail would likely run into millions of deaths, many of them far away in poorer nations receiving less govt aid (as with covid!) I think the whole 'nothing is enough the world will end!!' mentality does nothing but put those who are inclined to care into a state of deep depression and anxiety and those who are inclined to deny climate change into a better position to argue that the other side are being ridiculous. It does NOT help. The correct approach is a practical middle ground where we try to do what we can. In any case this govt response does somewhat epitomise the 'climate hysterics' mentality in that it is hugely impractical, ignores many questions of trade-offs and impact as if there were none to be answered and is unilateral enough to be meaningless in the wider global context. Keep in mind that if one country decides to take drastic action which tanks its economy, do you think other countries are likely to follow suit or rather elect govts that entirely unwind all and any climate action?

ako 6y ago
Not dealing with global warming will also lead to "the kind of economic impact such drastic action would entail would likely run into millions of deaths, many of them far away in poorer nations"
- barnacled 6y ago
  Did I suggest not addressing it? It's entirely this dismissive attitude that harms the cause. This 'all or nothing' attitude that reminds me of the gun control issue in the US. Since you've ignored most of what I said there, let me reduce the surface area of the discussion and ask 1 thing: Let's assume the UK does everything the climate 'activists' request of them, and this results in an economic depression and unprecedented unemployment and poverty - do you think this increases or decreases the likelihood of other countries following suit?

danielrpa 6y ago

Agreed. If the government was serious about starting a program for reducing emissions from internal combustion engines, it could start by gradually increasing the gasoline tax until it became prohibitively expensive to buy an internal combustion engine car in 2030. In your analogy, the diet would start on day 1 with an objective reduction in sweets, even if not 100% quite yet. BTW, I'm not saying that the government should increase the tax, I'm just saying that a concrete action in the present would go a long way towards building credibility.

AlphaSite 6y ago
This has the side effect of punishing those too poor to afford a petrol car, instead they can increase the cost of purchasing a petrol car, which directly taxes the more wealthy (new car buyers).

JimDabell 6y ago

I think you’re being a bit unfair here. The UK has made good progress in moving away from fossil fuels in recent years. As of June this year, the UK was generating more power from renewables than from fossil fuels. A decade ago hardly any power was being generated from renewables. The UK has gone months without burning coal this year, and plans to decommission the last three coal power plants in the next five years. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52973089 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52973089 These aren’t empty promises, this is solid progress.

tialaramex 6y ago
One of the things in these proposals that isn't as eye-catching as "ban petrol cars" was investment and subsidies to get to 4x wind power generation. Right now it's windy and the UK gets about 10GW of electricity from wind turbines (maybe a bit more) the past few days. But at 4x that would be 40GW of electricity, which would actually be enough to just power the whole country on a typical weekday evening (as the sun goes down, day time place of work usage isn't all stopped yet but home usage is picking up). Now, obviously it isn't always windy, but on the other hand it also isn't always a weekday evening. At 3am on a Sunday in June the country is ticking over at 20GW, and the weather doesn't care so your wind turbines might be kicking out 40GW anyway. We need to store or export that. That's a key challenge for the next decade.
pjc50 6y ago
The weird thing is that hardly anyone seems willing to take credit for this success.

truthwhisperer 6y ago

maybe we should just focus on less people on this planet right?

LockAndLol 6y ago

The responses to your comment are the epitome of our society: This is fine. We're fine. We'll be just fine. Even among people who don't deny climate change this complacent attitude prevails. It's why I believe this video presents everything nicely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8

flurdy 6y ago

> This is the same as my committing to start my diet, by giving up one specific thing, but not for a decade, after my doctor told me I gave 6m to lose weight or die. And to celebrate I'll eat two pizzas and 4 litres of soda, for breakfast. Great analogy. But to be honest politicians don't make drastic changes as they fear they will loose the next election. But I do believe they under estimate people's interest in dealing with climate change. Then again Brexit happened and people vote for Boris and Trump so what do I really know what the electorate wants.

DarkmSparks 6y ago

Global warming here is just for cover up. IMHO The real reason they dont want petrol cars in the UK is because the North Sea Oil is just about all gone.

asenk 6y ago

There is no "uk (and the rest of the worlds) attitude to global warming". There's s a small group of rogue countries like US trying to do their best to burn the planet while undermining climate agreements and not doing anything about climate change at 16+ tons of annual CO2 per capita, while some others are doing a whole lot, for example UK has pretty about halved their emissions from already a lot lower starting point, from 10.3 to 5.6 tons in the last 40 years.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]