I think it’s less about industry lobbying and more an unwillingness for these governments to actually do what needs to be done to reduce the roadblocks needed for an outright ban on new ICE vehicles.
There doesn’t seem to be much of push to get infrastructure like charging stations in place and it seems they thought it was a ‘reverse Field of Dreams’ where “if you come, they will build it.” Charging stations and grid upgrades aren’t going to appear out of the ether simply because some politicians want to ban ICE vehicles. I don’t know the situation in the EU, but here in the US, most of our charging stations are built by Tesla or VW (under the Electrify America name as a punishment for dieselgate). Tesla charging stations aren’t abundant everywhere and VW seems more than happy to let their charging stations become dilapidated and antiquated as they’re not building them willingly to begin with. There are many parts of the country where your only option to charge is a 120/240V outlet, which output as little as 3-4 miles per hour of charge. This isn’t the way forward and it’ll likely take government incentives to make it happen.
Where I live (NL, EU) there are several charging stations (+20 spots) within a 10 mile radius. Every neighborhood has like 5-10 parking spots with a charger. Around 10-15% of the residential housing have their own high-power charging outlet. Office buildings have around the same percentage (10-15%) of their parking lot converted to charging parking spots. Even parking lots in cities come with that same percentage of charging stations these days.
Next to that around 30% of all housing is equipped with solar panels. New office buildings and factories all have giant solar arrays on their roofs. No exceptions.
In the EU the biggest problem is not willingness or effort. The biggest problem is reality. You can’t connect that all to a power grid designed in the 60s. Energy infrastructure is hard, big and slow to build. Our grid is full. We are building like mad men but it just isn’t realisable in a short time. Especially since all of the EU is building a new grid at the same time… Building (nuclear) power plants, wind mills, conversion stations, high power grid cables all takes a lot of time.
But, mobility in the EU is starting to become too expensive for the median income. Here a litre of ron95 gasoline is around 2 euros. The purchase of new cars are taxed to insanity here in NL. Around 50% of the price is tax. A new electric vehicle with acceptable range is somewhere around 50-60k (ionic, ev5/6)
Electric vehicles had all sorts of tax exemptions. That’s changing. Soon they’re also taxes to the fullest.
Alas, everyone who doesn’t have a job which provides a car does what I do: drive that old piece of garbage till it really falls apart.
And I think that are the 2 main reasons for the laxer rules on ice vehicles. Reality regarding the needed infrastructure and cost to the public. Everything has become so much more expensive the last 4 years.
In my experience living in Hilversum (between Amsterdam and Utrecht) they’re great for covering that last “last mile” between a person’s home and mass public transport like the train and often do the same on the other side (between train and work place).
Given the massive (massive, MASSIVE) bicycle parking areas near the larger train stations, I would say that at least when it comes to trains the infrastructure is designed purposefully so that people can live further way from train stations and still get to the station quickly without requiring a car, since if they do require a car, in my experience, not just in The Netherlands, people often end up just taking the car all the way to their destination and skip the train altogether.
However, I can see how such a design that assumes bicycles are used like that, would be problematic for people who don’t use bicycles like that, since it will have fewer buses feeding the train station than if bicyles weren’t expected to cover most of those flows.
I my experience - having lived there and elsewhere in Europe - The Netherlands is invariably at the upper end of these things, even if the Dutch complain it’s still not good enough (I would even say the country’s “well above average” condition is probably because of that).
You should see the status of things in my native, car obcessed country of Portugal: all talkie-talkie yet a complete total disgrace for the rest. As for Renewables, the regulatory and legal framework has been designed to reward a few politically well connected companies (corruption over here is widespread, mainly at the higher levels and paid with the usual non-executive board memberships for “friendly” politicians and such), so personal solar generation is incredibly rare in this, one of the sunniest countries in Europe, because if you feed excess power to the grid you get at best 1/4 of what you pay for consuming it from the grid, and almost all of Renewables are big installations that no individual could ever have and hence are owned mainly by said politically well connected companies: hydrodams and large wind generators.
It doesn’t help that most people’s Ecological awareness is such a complete total joke that even for those who believe themselves as ecologically-minded ends at the point were they’re faced with, say, walking to take their kids to a school less than 1km away instead of going by car.
For all its problems (no country is perfect), The Netherlands if comparativelly a frigging paradise in this and a number of other domains.
It doesn’t help that most people’s Ecological awareness is such a complete total joke that even for those who believe themselves as ecologically-minded ends at the point were they’re faced with, say, walking to take their kids to a school less than 1km away instead of going by car
This tracks. Whenever I visit Portuguese relatives I’m always surprised by how quickly they default to the car. Once, it was literally to just take us to a train station that we could see with our eyes from where we were staying.
Weren’t a bunch of politicians caught in a scandal there recently about deals with fossil fuel companies?
It’s one of those things that “everybody does it” so only those who have lived elsewhere were the car culture is different tend to notice it.
As for politicians, just 2 days ago the Prime Minister resigned because he’s offically a suspect in some shenennigans involving “green hydrogen” (plus licensing for lithium mines and a massive data center project) which also caught somebody he has described as his “best friend” in the past, a senior member of the PM’s office (who is an ex-junior minister that lost his post in a smaller scandal involving an energy company a few years ago) and another minister.
Things haven’t been this entertaining over here in ages.
The Netherlands is very bad at public transport though. Some villages only have 1 bus per hour and only during rush hour, nothing during the rest of the day. This way we’ll never get away from cars.
Infrastructure needs central backing, that’s not exactly controversial. Would you rather each individual company has to fund its own chargers and end up with a patchwork that only works for each brand individually (and probably change over time to not support older models). Thats how the railways initially developed in 19th century Britain and it was a horrible mess of privately owned incompatible gauges.
Great, so would I. Doesn’t change the fact that in the here and now they aren’t and we cant wait for a great socialist revolution to start addressing climate change.
Can you name a single industry that wasn’t created off the back of government investment? This isn’t about handing money to private companies, it’s about getting the shit we need to comply with the laws that are being set. I’d fully support private industry funding the entire thing but what evidence is there that they’d actually do it? They haven’t over the last decade outside of Tesla, so what’s going to change that now?
I think it’s less about industry lobbying and more an unwillingness for these governments to actually do what needs to be done to reduce the roadblocks needed for an outright ban on new ICE vehicles.
There doesn’t seem to be much of push to get infrastructure like charging stations in place and it seems they thought it was a ‘reverse Field of Dreams’ where “if you come, they will build it.” Charging stations and grid upgrades aren’t going to appear out of the ether simply because some politicians want to ban ICE vehicles. I don’t know the situation in the EU, but here in the US, most of our charging stations are built by Tesla or VW (under the Electrify America name as a punishment for dieselgate). Tesla charging stations aren’t abundant everywhere and VW seems more than happy to let their charging stations become dilapidated and antiquated as they’re not building them willingly to begin with. There are many parts of the country where your only option to charge is a 120/240V outlet, which output as little as 3-4 miles per hour of charge. This isn’t the way forward and it’ll likely take government incentives to make it happen.
Where I live (NL, EU) there are several charging stations (+20 spots) within a 10 mile radius. Every neighborhood has like 5-10 parking spots with a charger. Around 10-15% of the residential housing have their own high-power charging outlet. Office buildings have around the same percentage (10-15%) of their parking lot converted to charging parking spots. Even parking lots in cities come with that same percentage of charging stations these days.
Next to that around 30% of all housing is equipped with solar panels. New office buildings and factories all have giant solar arrays on their roofs. No exceptions.
In the EU the biggest problem is not willingness or effort. The biggest problem is reality. You can’t connect that all to a power grid designed in the 60s. Energy infrastructure is hard, big and slow to build. Our grid is full. We are building like mad men but it just isn’t realisable in a short time. Especially since all of the EU is building a new grid at the same time… Building (nuclear) power plants, wind mills, conversion stations, high power grid cables all takes a lot of time.
But, mobility in the EU is starting to become too expensive for the median income. Here a litre of ron95 gasoline is around 2 euros. The purchase of new cars are taxed to insanity here in NL. Around 50% of the price is tax. A new electric vehicle with acceptable range is somewhere around 50-60k (ionic, ev5/6)
Electric vehicles had all sorts of tax exemptions. That’s changing. Soon they’re also taxes to the fullest.
Alas, everyone who doesn’t have a job which provides a car does what I do: drive that old piece of garbage till it really falls apart.
And I think that are the 2 main reasons for the laxer rules on ice vehicles. Reality regarding the needed infrastructure and cost to the public. Everything has become so much more expensive the last 4 years.
You didn’t even mention bicycles once!
Bikes aren’t for everyone. I personally don’t like them (and I’m Dutch, lol). I’d much rather see great public transport.
In my experience living in Hilversum (between Amsterdam and Utrecht) they’re great for covering that last “last mile” between a person’s home and mass public transport like the train and often do the same on the other side (between train and work place).
Given the massive (massive, MASSIVE) bicycle parking areas near the larger train stations, I would say that at least when it comes to trains the infrastructure is designed purposefully so that people can live further way from train stations and still get to the station quickly without requiring a car, since if they do require a car, in my experience, not just in The Netherlands, people often end up just taking the car all the way to their destination and skip the train altogether.
However, I can see how such a design that assumes bicycles are used like that, would be problematic for people who don’t use bicycles like that, since it will have fewer buses feeding the train station than if bicyles weren’t expected to cover most of those flows.
I my experience - having lived there and elsewhere in Europe - The Netherlands is invariably at the upper end of these things, even if the Dutch complain it’s still not good enough (I would even say the country’s “well above average” condition is probably because of that).
You should see the status of things in my native, car obcessed country of Portugal: all talkie-talkie yet a complete total disgrace for the rest. As for Renewables, the regulatory and legal framework has been designed to reward a few politically well connected companies (corruption over here is widespread, mainly at the higher levels and paid with the usual non-executive board memberships for “friendly” politicians and such), so personal solar generation is incredibly rare in this, one of the sunniest countries in Europe, because if you feed excess power to the grid you get at best 1/4 of what you pay for consuming it from the grid, and almost all of Renewables are big installations that no individual could ever have and hence are owned mainly by said politically well connected companies: hydrodams and large wind generators.
It doesn’t help that most people’s Ecological awareness is such a complete total joke that even for those who believe themselves as ecologically-minded ends at the point were they’re faced with, say, walking to take their kids to a school less than 1km away instead of going by car.
For all its problems (no country is perfect), The Netherlands if comparativelly a frigging paradise in this and a number of other domains.
This tracks. Whenever I visit Portuguese relatives I’m always surprised by how quickly they default to the car. Once, it was literally to just take us to a train station that we could see with our eyes from where we were staying.
Weren’t a bunch of politicians caught in a scandal there recently about deals with fossil fuel companies?
It’s one of those things that “everybody does it” so only those who have lived elsewhere were the car culture is different tend to notice it.
As for politicians, just 2 days ago the Prime Minister resigned because he’s offically a suspect in some shenennigans involving “green hydrogen” (plus licensing for lithium mines and a massive data center project) which also caught somebody he has described as his “best friend” in the past, a senior member of the PM’s office (who is an ex-junior minister that lost his post in a smaller scandal involving an energy company a few years ago) and another minister.
Things haven’t been this entertaining over here in ages.
And that is exactly the reason, why HVO100 diesel and Blue95 need to happen NOW and not in 20 years.
Maybe society doesn’t need to have cars at all?
The Netherlands is very bad at public transport though. Some villages only have 1 bus per hour and only during rush hour, nothing during the rest of the day. This way we’ll never get away from cars.
On the other hand you have good public transit
Is this code for taxpayer handouts to private businesses so they can maximize profit off of customers?
There it is!
Infrastructure needs central backing, that’s not exactly controversial. Would you rather each individual company has to fund its own chargers and end up with a patchwork that only works for each brand individually (and probably change over time to not support older models). Thats how the railways initially developed in 19th century Britain and it was a horrible mess of privately owned incompatible gauges.
Or maybe the government could take care of it themselves since the private sector can’t be bothered.
I’d rather businesses that require government funding to operate to be owned by the government.
Great, so would I. Doesn’t change the fact that in the here and now they aren’t and we cant wait for a great socialist revolution to start addressing climate change.
It doesn’t take a great socialist revolution, and nations won’t stop using fossil fuels as long as they remain cheaper than other options.
Other options won’t be cheaper until we run out of easily-extractable oil.
Can you name a single industry that wasn’t created off the back of government investment? This isn’t about handing money to private companies, it’s about getting the shit we need to comply with the laws that are being set. I’d fully support private industry funding the entire thing but what evidence is there that they’d actually do it? They haven’t over the last decade outside of Tesla, so what’s going to change that now?
If it needs government money to survive, then it should be owned by the government.
That way, the only people getting paid are the ones doing the work. We won’t be wasting money on private ‘owners’.
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