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posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 07 2017, @06:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-have-methane dept.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40518293

France is set to ban the sale of any car that uses petrol or diesel fuel by 2040, in what the ecology minister called a "revolution".

Nicolas Hulot announced the planned ban on fossil fuel vehicles as part of a renewed commitment to the Paris climate deal.

He said France planned to become carbon neutral by 2050.

Hybrid cars make up about 3.5% of the French market, with pure electric vehicles accounting for just 1.2%.

It is not yet clear what will happen to existing fossil fuel vehicles still in use in 2040.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @06:51PM (12 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @06:51PM (#536215)

    At the very worse, the US can just sit back and let France try to innovate; should France succeed, the US can just copy what works and improve upon it in the process.

    Let these hangers-on do the hard work for once!

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday July 07 2017, @07:08PM (4 children)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday July 07 2017, @07:08PM (#536221) Journal

    the US can just copy what works and improve upon it in the process.

    If that were true we would've copied their medical system by now. It's vastly superior by every metric.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by digitalaudiorock on Friday July 07 2017, @07:56PM

      by digitalaudiorock (688) on Friday July 07 2017, @07:56PM (#536245) Journal

      If that were true we would've copied their medical system by now. It's vastly superior by every metric.

      Indeed. The 'pubs love quoting the famous Winston Churchill statement "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.", yet do everything imaginable to prove that even that was far too generous.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @11:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @11:14PM (#536306)

      The reason the Europeans' bad system hasn't been adopted in place of the Americans' worse system, is because there are a lot of Americans who see another system that is even better: A Free Market.

      The fighting between ideologues makes it difficult to adopt any system in particular.

    • (Score: 2) by Sulla on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:09AM

      by Sulla (5173) on Saturday July 08 2017, @02:09AM (#536367) Journal

      I would rather be in debt than in pain or dead.

      --
      Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @05:12AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @05:12AM (#536433)

      Their metric system is another thing America isn't ready for.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday July 07 2017, @07:16PM (6 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 07 2017, @07:16PM (#536226) Journal

    Hahaha, you think that US conservatives are going to recognize when an ideological center-point of theirs has failed or backfired?

    That's not how this works. When evidence suggesting we're on the wrong course comes up, you blame the liberals who've instituted zero actually-progressive policies in decades, and drive further into insanity.

    I fully expect that if the world standardizes on electric cars, for a last ditch effort to "save coal jobs" banning them to be the policy du jour.

    • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday July 07 2017, @07:34PM (5 children)

      by Unixnut (5779) on Friday July 07 2017, @07:34PM (#536238)

      "I fully expect that if the world standardizes on electric cars, for a last ditch effort to "save coal jobs" banning them to be the policy du jour. "

      Actually, if you want to save coal jobs, just ban anything except electric cars, and then watch as all the coal power plants go up to supply the energy.

      Win win, you keep coal miners employed, the eco-warriors get their "pollution free future" (primarily because they can't see all the emissions, as they are far far away out of the cities), and all those coal futures will rally, making your friends in high places even richer.

      • (Score: 3, Flamebait) by ikanreed on Friday July 07 2017, @07:45PM (1 child)

        by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 07 2017, @07:45PM (#536243) Journal

        Rule 1 of understanding republicans: all policies, regardless of actual logic, must have an element of "sticking it to the libs". If it feels like a counterpoint to a liberal position, then it will obviously help whatever thing they've been saying libs want to destroy. Results do not matter in this calculus.

        No actual current republican positions do anything positive for coal jobs under critical analysis. The biggest positions relating to fossil fuels as stated seem to benefit Canadian fracking concerns most.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:38AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:38AM (#536419)

          The biggest positions relating to fossil fuels as stated seem to benefit Canadian fracking concerns most.

          That must be who's pumping out the most propaganda on this wedge issue then. The one thing that infuriates me about conservatives is how uncritically they lap up corporate propaganda. People in the "political liberal" tribe seem to be swayed by it now and then, depending on the issue, but not nearly as much as conservatives are.

          (It would truly impress me to meet somebody who isn't swayed by it at all.)

          All the social wedge issues are nothing more than corporate propaganda. They are truly inconsequential other than to act as a lens for the new, improved aristocracy, the corporate class, to focus all attention on, distracting away from the more ineffable things that really matter.

      • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday July 07 2017, @08:54PM (2 children)

        by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday July 07 2017, @08:54PM (#536259) Journal

        and then watch as all the coal power plants go up to supply the energy.

        No, they'd build natural gas plants for that. A natural gas plant costs about half of what a coal plant costs to build and operate. Why do you hate capitalism?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @09:31PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @09:31PM (#536274)

          If the USA went all electric cars over a short time frame, I think we'd need all the natural gas, coal, wind, solar and every other kind of electric production that we could get. This is a lot of power we are talking about, current USA usage is over 350 million gallons of petroleum...PER DAY.
                https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_transportation#tab2 [eia.gov]

          Anyone care to convert to the number of large electric generators needed to replace all that (given that electric cars tend to be more efficient, due to regen?)

          • (Score: 1) by Acabatag on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:31AM

            by Acabatag (2885) on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:31AM (#536416)

            If America went all electric cars in a short timeframe, we'd need to convert a large area of land mass into scrapyards to store the current fleet of vehicles in. It just could never happen, though it's interesting enough to speculate about.

            There would be a groundswell of electric-conversion projects, though. There have always been people into tinkering around who would thrive in an economy where people needed a new engine for their old car.