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What "begins"? Ethiopia, barely a country, torn by civil war, without a shred of functional infrastructure anywhere in sight... is banning internal combustion

What "begins"? Ethiopia, barely a country, torn by civil war, without a shred of functional infrastructure anywhere in sight... is banning internal combustion cars... and this is supposed to indicate newsworthy progress? This is a land where large parts of the population are living in extreme poverty, living on the brink of starvation, with extremely limited access to food or water or basic infrastructure. They should be the last country to ban internal combustion cars...

nonrandomstring 3y ago
And yet they're leading the world on a policy issue that nearly every person in rich, developed nations has in their top 10 most urgent concerns. Galling isn't it?
- sentientslug 3y ago
  .
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    How could you possibly know anything about me and struggle? Spoken like a presumptuous upstart.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  This sounds like a tropical country banning oil&gas heating in winter.
- csmpltn 3y ago
  I think you need to be told this in a very direct manner, so I'll take a stab at it: this is a country where the vast majority of the population can't shit down anything resembling a toilet, let alone wash their hands after they are done, because there's no infrastructure to support any of that. Forget stable and predictable access to food, or water, or medicine, or education. Compared to anything in the west - this country is in complete shambles, and their population is poor and is severely disadvantaged. You're sitting here celebrating what exactly? Their continued descent into eternal poverty and de-industrialization? Most people over there have a shit standard of living, but people like you are sitting here and celebrating that?
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Oh sweet baby Jesus, please do be civil sir. I can almost feel you popping a vein getting into a pompous flap over someone challenging your parochial world view. Here's an example I have first hand experience with. Portugal was often considered the "poor man of Europe". When I was there at the end of the last century it was almost impossible to get reliable communication without a satellite phone. I was stuck out in the mountains where nobody could afford a telephone since the cost of having copper run over 10km was too much even if the whole village clubbed together. I returned to London and thought rather little of it for years until I spoke to a family member there who said, I'll just email you some photos over. Seconds later my inbox was filled with hi-res jpegs. This must be costing you a fortune, I said, thinking of the old satphone. No, we're using the new dish! In Portugal, between 1999 and 2004, using a big EU development grant, most of the "poor south" went from having no telecoms at all to having some of the finest and cheapest in Europe. It was perfect for new LOS microwave links that meshed across the country. In fact, without a legacy of copper providers to wrestle with, the transition was cheaper and smoother. It's called "leapfrogging", which is a concept used in economics and business to describe rapid growth that bypasses stages assumed to be necessary, see Schumpeter, Stiglitz and Tirole and [0] I do know a little something of what Ethiopia is like from people who've served or lived there - so the lecture from someone who probably can't find it on a map is a tad tedious. As I understand it's a beautiful and fertile place, sadly torn by endless war. Anyway, you may know that African countries are leapfrogging at an astonishing rate, often spurred by Chinese investment. Indeed their "disadvantage" may be their greatest advantage, of not being under the heel of Western interests. They don't need to go through the environmentally devastating process of petrochemical industrialism if they can just go straight to a post-petro economy. Now if you've got something civil and interesting to say about Chinese investment, what that might mean I'd love to hear. But all said, hats-off to them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging
    - strickman 3y ago
      Unfortunately, the lack the industriousness of the Chinese people is certain to hinder the velocity of innovation we'd see with a purely Ethiopian effort. People don't eschew the "Made in China" label without reason. With hand tools for example, I started with Chinese made Harbor Freight in my 20's, German in my 30's, now it's either Ethiopian tools or "I'm not doing this project".
acdha 3y ago
That sounds like the best place to start: cars are the most expensive form of transportation, an order of magnitude greater emissions (even EVs), and have massive negative externalities affecting the surrounding communities regardless of power source. If you haven’t made the mistake of building your society around them, it’s much cheaper not to start and then need to deal with the painful disruption of redesigning your transportation network in a decade.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  > cars are the most expensive form of transportation I think you'll find private jets are more expensive than cars. Worse in every regard to your other points as well. Jets are still permitted. So your points can't be the reason as if it was you'd also ban private air travel.
  - acdha 3y ago
    I didn’t think that we needed to spell out the context of ground transportation since that’s what the article is about, but sure.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
audunw 3y ago
It begunstiget because you now have countries on both sides of the economic scale pushing to ban them. Norway being on the other side of the spectrum. EVs could be hugely beneficial to developing countries as it’s a path to energy independence, and with cheap LiFePo batteries there’s a path to make EVs much cheaper than ICE could ever be. So EVs start to eat at the ICE market from both sides of the spectrum. It’s like cell phones vs land lines all over again. Many poor countries never even built land lines and leapfrogged straight to cell phones even though that was the more expensive technology to start with.
- PedroBatista 3y ago
  > EVs could be hugely beneficial to developing countries as it’s a path to energy independence, and with cheap LiFePo batteries there’s a path to make EVs much cheaper than ICE could ever be. Everything tends to be "coulda shoulda woulda" when it comes to EVs.. If that's the case, then they wouldn't even need to ban anything, the benefits and the market would be so obvious, poor people obviously would buy EVs. To be clear, I kinda agree with your statement, but then don't wasted the little resources you have chasing a big dream constructed by other people who you don't owe anything. Wait it out.
  - simfree 3y ago
    Small electric vehicles are winning customers from gas, just look at the rise of small 2 and 4 wheeled electric vehicles in India: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/business/india-electric-vehicles-push-challenges-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/business/india-electric-vehic... https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/business/india-electric-vehicles-push-challenges-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/business/india-electric-vehic...
- csmpltn 3y ago
  > "Norway being on the other side of the spectrum." I suggest you follow the public debate around EVs in Norway, especially with regards to their performance this winter. The public transportation system (which has largely transitioned to EV-only fleets) has collapsed completely and come under severe pressure to roll back to fossilized vehicles. There's a growing pressure to reverse the push for using EVs everywhere, since the technology just doesn't seem to hold up to the weather conditions. Electric busses, taxis, trains and ferries have all underperformed, broke down, and brought Norway's largest cities to a halt on plenty of occasions this winter. Outside of the large metropolitans, in the rural parts of the country - nobody uses EVs because they're completely impractical. People just can't risk running out of battery when it's -25 Celsius outside and the nearest charging station is an hour's drive away. EVs are heavier to drive up icy and snowy roads, and often get stuck in such conditions. The busses in Oslo are driving without air conditioning, even when it's freezing outside, to preserve battery power. People in the large metropolitans are now regularly being asked by the authorities to just stay at home and not go to work due to public transportation systems collapsing completely under the slightest snowfall or rainfall. There's another debate in Norway about the severe lack of EV charging infrastructure. Coupled with the doubling of electricity prices this past year and the economic downturn - the public discourse has turned on the rapid adoption of EVs. > "Many poor countries never even built land lines and leapfrogged straight to cell phones even though that was the more expensive technology to start with." Cellular technology requires much less infrastructure to set-up and maintain (as opposed to land-lines). EVs are the complete opposite. They require charging infrastructure everywhere. You need to connect the entire country to a reliable electric grid, and spread charging stations everywhere. It's the complete opposite analogy to the deprecation of analog telephony... As opposed to electricity - fuel can be easily transported and stored around the country in numerous ways... you can transport fuel with donkeys, trucks, trains, cars, jugs, bottles...
pavlov 3y ago
> “Ethiopia, barely a country, torn by civil war, without a shred of functional infrastructure anywhere in sight” Look up some pictures of Addis Ababa. It’s probably not what you expect. The regional differences within Ethiopia are very large. One way to grasp the scale is to look at UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) rankings. The poorest Ethiopian regions have an HDI score around 0.44 [1] while Addis Ababa reaches 0.74. That’s higher than many Mexican states. For comparison, Mississippi has a HDI rating of 0.866. By this metric, life in the Ethiopian capital is much closer to living in the poorest American state than to living in other parts of Ethiopia. They have stable power, cars, highways, office towers, malls, and the rest of developed infrastructure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ethiopian_regions_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ethiopian_regions_by_H...
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  Of course a country’s capital will always be relatively developed. But Addis Ababa contains less than 5% of Ethiopia’s population…the majority live in horrible conditions.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Ethiopia has a population of 120 million people. Six million of them living in a relatively developed environment seems like pretty clear evidence against the claim that it’s “barely a country” and “without a shred of infrastructure.”
COGlory 3y ago
Are you confusing Ethiopia with Sudan? There has been some violence in Ethiopia, but they absolutely have real infrastructure.
- Blahah 3y ago
  Are you confusing Sudan with the moon? I spent a month teaching at the university of Khartoum, and another couple of weeks travelling around the country, and Sudan has working infrastructure that is only inhibited by sanctions.
Blahah 3y ago
Barely a country? Without a shred of infrastructure? You haven't been to Ethiopia, or learned about its history, clearly. Ethiopia is not only very much a country (with that name since 330 AD), but one orders of magnitude older and more deeply rooted in human history than, for example, the USA. The earliest known hominid archealogical evidence is from Ethiopia (circa 4 million years ago). It's the only African nation not to be colonised by genocidal Europeans. Haile Salassie - former emperor of Ethiopia - led the country to victory over fascism, and changed the direction of Euro-African relations, and is revered in the Rastafarian religion. This barely scratches the surface of how worthy of your attention Ethiopia is.
- strickman 3y ago
  That was merciful. You went easy on that guy, mentioning only items of cultural and religious significance. Next time hit him with the big guns - Ethiopian contributions to theoretical physics, chemistry, architecture, engineering, philosophy, industry, computer science, and pure mathematics.
  - boeingUH60 3y ago
    All those so-called contributions, yet they can’t save themselves from a $925 GDP per capita and 69% of people being classified as “multidimensionally poor” [1]. Ethiopia is a typical useless African nation marred by excessive corruption and mindless tribalism. 1 - https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/Country-Profiles/MPI/ETH.pdf https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/Country-Profiles/MP...
    - strickman 3y ago
      Try to manage a single day having given up all the elements of advanced civilization yielded by an Ethiopian mind. We'll see if you make it to lunch. E.g. - ABS (Applied Bottle Sciences) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e-IMCcWdcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e-IMCcWdcM
      - boeingUH60 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nunez 3y ago
Yes. China has had very close relationships with Africa for years. Super discounted or free infrastructure for oil. I can totally see BYD/Xpeng/etc. being huge enough to support this ban.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

And yet they're leading the world on a policy issue that nearly every person in rich, developed nations has in their top 10 most urgent concerns. Galling isn't it?

sentientslug 3y ago
.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  How could you possibly know anything about me and struggle? Spoken like a presumptuous upstart.
avgcorrection 3y ago
This sounds like a tropical country banning oil&gas heating in winter.
csmpltn 3y ago
I think you need to be told this in a very direct manner, so I'll take a stab at it: this is a country where the vast majority of the population can't shit down anything resembling a toilet, let alone wash their hands after they are done, because there's no infrastructure to support any of that. Forget stable and predictable access to food, or water, or medicine, or education. Compared to anything in the west - this country is in complete shambles, and their population is poor and is severely disadvantaged. You're sitting here celebrating what exactly? Their continued descent into eternal poverty and de-industrialization? Most people over there have a shit standard of living, but people like you are sitting here and celebrating that?
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Oh sweet baby Jesus, please do be civil sir. I can almost feel you popping a vein getting into a pompous flap over someone challenging your parochial world view. Here's an example I have first hand experience with. Portugal was often considered the "poor man of Europe". When I was there at the end of the last century it was almost impossible to get reliable communication without a satellite phone. I was stuck out in the mountains where nobody could afford a telephone since the cost of having copper run over 10km was too much even if the whole village clubbed together. I returned to London and thought rather little of it for years until I spoke to a family member there who said, I'll just email you some photos over. Seconds later my inbox was filled with hi-res jpegs. This must be costing you a fortune, I said, thinking of the old satphone. No, we're using the new dish! In Portugal, between 1999 and 2004, using a big EU development grant, most of the "poor south" went from having no telecoms at all to having some of the finest and cheapest in Europe. It was perfect for new LOS microwave links that meshed across the country. In fact, without a legacy of copper providers to wrestle with, the transition was cheaper and smoother. It's called "leapfrogging", which is a concept used in economics and business to describe rapid growth that bypasses stages assumed to be necessary, see Schumpeter, Stiglitz and Tirole and [0] I do know a little something of what Ethiopia is like from people who've served or lived there - so the lecture from someone who probably can't find it on a map is a tad tedious. As I understand it's a beautiful and fertile place, sadly torn by endless war. Anyway, you may know that African countries are leapfrogging at an astonishing rate, often spurred by Chinese investment. Indeed their "disadvantage" may be their greatest advantage, of not being under the heel of Western interests. They don't need to go through the environmentally devastating process of petrochemical industrialism if they can just go straight to a post-petro economy. Now if you've got something civil and interesting to say about Chinese investment, what that might mean I'd love to hear. But all said, hats-off to them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging
  - strickman 3y ago
    Unfortunately, the lack the industriousness of the Chinese people is certain to hinder the velocity of innovation we'd see with a purely Ethiopian effort. People don't eschew the "Made in China" label without reason. With hand tools for example, I started with Chinese made Harbor Freight in my 20's, German in my 30's, now it's either Ethiopian tools or "I'm not doing this project".

acdha 3y ago

That sounds like the best place to start: cars are the most expensive form of transportation, an order of magnitude greater emissions (even EVs), and have massive negative externalities affecting the surrounding communities regardless of power source. If you haven’t made the mistake of building your society around them, it’s much cheaper not to start and then need to deal with the painful disruption of redesigning your transportation network in a decade.

willcipriano 3y ago
> cars are the most expensive form of transportation I think you'll find private jets are more expensive than cars. Worse in every regard to your other points as well. Jets are still permitted. So your points can't be the reason as if it was you'd also ban private air travel.
- acdha 3y ago
  I didn’t think that we needed to spell out the context of ground transportation since that’s what the article is about, but sure.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

audunw 3y ago

It begunstiget because you now have countries on both sides of the economic scale pushing to ban them. Norway being on the other side of the spectrum. EVs could be hugely beneficial to developing countries as it’s a path to energy independence, and with cheap LiFePo batteries there’s a path to make EVs much cheaper than ICE could ever be. So EVs start to eat at the ICE market from both sides of the spectrum. It’s like cell phones vs land lines all over again. Many poor countries never even built land lines and leapfrogged straight to cell phones even though that was the more expensive technology to start with.

PedroBatista 3y ago
> EVs could be hugely beneficial to developing countries as it’s a path to energy independence, and with cheap LiFePo batteries there’s a path to make EVs much cheaper than ICE could ever be. Everything tends to be "coulda shoulda woulda" when it comes to EVs.. If that's the case, then they wouldn't even need to ban anything, the benefits and the market would be so obvious, poor people obviously would buy EVs. To be clear, I kinda agree with your statement, but then don't wasted the little resources you have chasing a big dream constructed by other people who you don't owe anything. Wait it out.
- simfree 3y ago
  Small electric vehicles are winning customers from gas, just look at the rise of small 2 and 4 wheeled electric vehicles in India: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/business/india-electric-vehicles-push-challenges-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/business/india-electric-vehic... https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/business/india-electric-vehicles-push-challenges-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/business/india-electric-vehic...
csmpltn 3y ago
> "Norway being on the other side of the spectrum." I suggest you follow the public debate around EVs in Norway, especially with regards to their performance this winter. The public transportation system (which has largely transitioned to EV-only fleets) has collapsed completely and come under severe pressure to roll back to fossilized vehicles. There's a growing pressure to reverse the push for using EVs everywhere, since the technology just doesn't seem to hold up to the weather conditions. Electric busses, taxis, trains and ferries have all underperformed, broke down, and brought Norway's largest cities to a halt on plenty of occasions this winter. Outside of the large metropolitans, in the rural parts of the country - nobody uses EVs because they're completely impractical. People just can't risk running out of battery when it's -25 Celsius outside and the nearest charging station is an hour's drive away. EVs are heavier to drive up icy and snowy roads, and often get stuck in such conditions. The busses in Oslo are driving without air conditioning, even when it's freezing outside, to preserve battery power. People in the large metropolitans are now regularly being asked by the authorities to just stay at home and not go to work due to public transportation systems collapsing completely under the slightest snowfall or rainfall. There's another debate in Norway about the severe lack of EV charging infrastructure. Coupled with the doubling of electricity prices this past year and the economic downturn - the public discourse has turned on the rapid adoption of EVs. > "Many poor countries never even built land lines and leapfrogged straight to cell phones even though that was the more expensive technology to start with." Cellular technology requires much less infrastructure to set-up and maintain (as opposed to land-lines). EVs are the complete opposite. They require charging infrastructure everywhere. You need to connect the entire country to a reliable electric grid, and spread charging stations everywhere. It's the complete opposite analogy to the deprecation of analog telephony... As opposed to electricity - fuel can be easily transported and stored around the country in numerous ways... you can transport fuel with donkeys, trucks, trains, cars, jugs, bottles...

pavlov 3y ago

> “Ethiopia, barely a country, torn by civil war, without a shred of functional infrastructure anywhere in sight” Look up some pictures of Addis Ababa. It’s probably not what you expect. The regional differences within Ethiopia are very large. One way to grasp the scale is to look at UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) rankings. The poorest Ethiopian regions have an HDI score around 0.44 [1] while Addis Ababa reaches 0.74. That’s higher than many Mexican states. For comparison, Mississippi has a HDI rating of 0.866. By this metric, life in the Ethiopian capital is much closer to living in the poorest American state than to living in other parts of Ethiopia. They have stable power, cars, highways, office towers, malls, and the rest of developed infrastructure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ethiopian_regions_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ethiopian_regions_by_H...

boeingUH60 3y ago
Of course a country’s capital will always be relatively developed. But Addis Ababa contains less than 5% of Ethiopia’s population…the majority live in horrible conditions.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Ethiopia has a population of 120 million people. Six million of them living in a relatively developed environment seems like pretty clear evidence against the claim that it’s “barely a country” and “without a shred of infrastructure.”

COGlory 3y ago

Are you confusing Ethiopia with Sudan? There has been some violence in Ethiopia, but they absolutely have real infrastructure.

Blahah 3y ago
Are you confusing Sudan with the moon? I spent a month teaching at the university of Khartoum, and another couple of weeks travelling around the country, and Sudan has working infrastructure that is only inhibited by sanctions.

Blahah 3y ago

Barely a country? Without a shred of infrastructure? You haven't been to Ethiopia, or learned about its history, clearly. Ethiopia is not only very much a country (with that name since 330 AD), but one orders of magnitude older and more deeply rooted in human history than, for example, the USA. The earliest known hominid archealogical evidence is from Ethiopia (circa 4 million years ago). It's the only African nation not to be colonised by genocidal Europeans. Haile Salassie - former emperor of Ethiopia - led the country to victory over fascism, and changed the direction of Euro-African relations, and is revered in the Rastafarian religion. This barely scratches the surface of how worthy of your attention Ethiopia is.

strickman 3y ago
That was merciful. You went easy on that guy, mentioning only items of cultural and religious significance. Next time hit him with the big guns - Ethiopian contributions to theoretical physics, chemistry, architecture, engineering, philosophy, industry, computer science, and pure mathematics.
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  All those so-called contributions, yet they can’t save themselves from a $925 GDP per capita and 69% of people being classified as “multidimensionally poor” [1]. Ethiopia is a typical useless African nation marred by excessive corruption and mindless tribalism. 1 - https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/Country-Profiles/MPI/ETH.pdf https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/Country-Profiles/MP...
  - strickman 3y ago
    Try to manage a single day having given up all the elements of advanced civilization yielded by an Ethiopian mind. We'll see if you make it to lunch. E.g. - ABS (Applied Bottle Sciences) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e-IMCcWdcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e-IMCcWdcM
    - boeingUH60 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nunez 3y ago

Yes. China has had very close relationships with Africa for years. Super discounted or free infrastructure for oil. I can totally see BYD/Xpeng/etc. being huge enough to support this ban.