Climate Change: Moving faster

Back in 2017, the UK announced that it would ban the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles by 2040. Its a basic climate change measure, aimed at reducing emissions by shifting the vehicle fleet to cleaner technologies. Now, in the wake of the pandemic, they're planning to bring it forward to 2030:

The UK is poised to bring forward its ban on new fossil fuel vehicles from 2040 to 2030 to help speed up the rollout of electric vehicles across British roads.

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The government has previously consulted on plans to bring forward the deadline on sales of new polluting vehicles from 2040 to 2035. It is now expected to take a more ambitious stance following assurances that the UK’s infrastructure will be ready to cope with the shift to electric cars.

The decision to end the sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030 would put the UK ahead of France, which has a 2040 ban in the pipeline, and in line with Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. Norway will bring in a ban in 2025.

Meanwhile, New Zealand doesn't even have an electric vehicle policy, instead relying on the market (and a patheticly low capped carbon price) to drive the shift. And so, as the rest of the world electrifies, we're going to get the dirty fossil fuel vehicles they're dumping. Its a perfect example of what is wrong with climate change policy in this country: the government is unwilling to do anything which might disrupt the dirty, unsustainable status quo.