Ban on petrol and diesel cars by 2040

[Guest]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...=feeds-newsxml

I wish we could ban them on polluting the atmosphere from what comes out of their mouths.

[Jeff Turbo]

Daily Mail is full of it

[Russ]

Good job its clegg coming out with this rubbish. When he's flipping burgers in McDonalds after the next election he won't have too much power

[countrydude]

You missed the 'sh' there jeff

Daily Mail is full of it

[countrydude]

Something like this will never pass. It may well become crazily expensive to drive them but there is no way it will pass the houses of parliament, let alone the lords.

[PhilBill]

It is not only Clegg that is finished, the Lib Dems are too. By getting them into coalition the Tories have undermined their centre left and protest vote, making it a choice between Tories and Labour in a 'who do you hate least' contest.

This green stuff smacks of desperation by Clegg. Mind you lots of cities in Germany have restrictions on older cars entering them.

This is all about electric cars. It was in the news recently that the privatised electricity system may have trouble avoiding blackouts in the next five years, trying to meet current demand never mind powering large numbers of cars. And windmills - not exactly on demand electricity...

[maestro dave]

Good job its clegg coming out with this rubbish. When he's flipping burgers in McDonalds after the next election he won't have too much power

The thing is like all rest of them he will walk away with a nice BIG pension and lots of perks for the rest of his life that's why they all get into politics

[G51 NAV]

What we could end up with is a compromise. That by Date X (let's still pick 2040 out of thin air) it'll cost an absolute arm and a leg to buy petrol/diesel, those petrol/diesel cars that are left (such as classics from the 20th and early 21st century) will be mileage-limited, and quite possibly they'll be banned from the major towns and cities.

[F825 UBD]

Another example of not letting the facts get in the way of a policy:

1) Hybrid cars use lots of exotic materials (such as rare earth metals) and consequently produce huge amounts of carbon dioxide during the manufacturing process. A better way to look at the 'greeness' of a car is the 'dust-to-dust' figure - the amount of carbon a car produces from manufacture, through its life, until it is scrapped. Believe it or not, or this measure one of the greenest cars you can buy is a Hummer! (nearly all pure steel/iron!)

2) Electric cars will always be useless due to their limited range and long recharge times (not to mention the huge cost of replacing the batteries, which will occur frequently with the fast-charge systems). the only way to make them practical would be an induction system, where you bury cabling under (at least main) roads so cars recharge as they drive, but that would cost billions, probably trillions. Or you have overhead wires everywhere and have trolley-cars instead!

I have always thought the solution to the recharge problem was to have common, easy-install battery packs in all electric cars, then have stations around where you drive in, have your pack changed and then drive out again. Doesn't seem much appetite for that though!

What we really should be investing in is not all the silly renewables that will never be reliable and pump it all into fusion research. If we crack fusion, we will have a virtually unlimited supply of zero-carbon electricity which we can use to produce hydrogen from water. Problem solved

Apologies for the long post!!