The Death Of Fossil Fuels

[TopBadger]

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/ ... ves-budget

This, if true, is hardly likely to help the transition to EV's.

It's crazy enough that my old Euro6 diesel car attracted £100 less in VED each year than my EV - when VED is supposedly structure on polluting costs.

Not scheduled to 2028? Great, another thing Reform can oppose that will be popular with the masses.

[bjn]

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/ ... ves-budget

This, if true, is hardly likely to help the transition to EV's.

It's crazy enough that my old Euro6 diesel car attracted £100 less in VED each year than my EV - when VED is supposedly structure on polluting costs.

Not scheduled to 2028? Great, another thing Reform can oppose that will be popular with the masses.

Stupid on so many levels. Reeves might be in a bad place because of a decade and a half of Tory misrule, but she really is a dipshit. Reducing demand for oil improves balance of trade and increase energy security.

Pigovian tax the f.ck out of things you want people to do less of and subsidise the things you want people to do, at least until you get to the point of the bad thing being dead and the good thing being the norm.

[nekomatic]

Yes and no - I think everyone agrees that the revenue shortfall as people switch from ICE cars to electric needs to be met somehow, and much as we need to encourage that switch we also need to encourage switching from driving to public transport and active travel, so that’s really where the subsidies should go if anywhere. Hopefully the secret ingredient will be reinstating the fuel duty escalator so driving ICE remains comfortably more expensive than driving electric…

Storing electricity is like storing any perishable good, is an analogy I haven’t heard before but I like it
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insight ... mechanger/

That’s really good, thanks.

[IvanV]

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/ ... ves-budget

This, if true, is hardly likely to help the transition to EV's.

It's crazy enough that my old Euro6 diesel car attracted £100 less in VED each year than my EV - when VED is supposedly structure on polluting costs.

Not scheduled to 2028? Great, another thing Reform can oppose that will be popular with the masses.

Hedgehog in Private Eye (who I don't always agree with*) this issue is on the nose in pointing out that it is very unhelpful to the cities that the government is requiring to clean up their air, that government simultaneously applies policies that have the effect of encouraging SUV ownership and hence increased pollution from ICEs.

The government has had to bring back EV subsidies to keep EV sales growth going, in part because so many of its other policies are unhelpful to it. Though at least it has done that. In Germany, BEV sales fell about 25% in 2024 vs 2023. The UK is now the biggest market in Europe for BEVs, albeit they have a higher market share in a few places like Norway.

But the government, any government, is a bit between a rock and a hard place on this, because of the potential impact of environmental policies on the less well off. Several years ago, I several times asked, in various forums, how was the government to avoid the transition to EVs becoming another engine expanding social inequality. And the best anyone could do was say, "good question". Because they really really didn't like the implications of trying to avoid it.

Clearly we will eventually need to tax EVs rather than subsidise them. But if a per mile charge is to be introduced, it should clearly apply to all cars, not just EVs. But then, how do we avoid that being a tax on the poor, when it is increasingly the poor who are the residual users of fossil fuel cars. Because it is difficult for them to get access to the cheap charging those of us with our own drive and charger can have; and because there isn't the availability of cheap second hand old bangers you can repair yourself (though that's getting harder with even ICE cars becoming laptops on wheels), like in the ICE market.

The installation of chargers, and the price of electricity from them, is left to the market at the moment. But that will inevitably lead to social inequality. We understand that we can't just leave housing to the market when it comes to the less well off. I think we also need to understand that there is a social issue in car charging too, if we are to enforce people to use electric cars. Because plenty of the less well off depend on their cars, and will become unable to drive around in the old bangers they currently satisfy that requirement with. I think there needs to be a degree of regulation of the price of electricity from certain car charges, and some degree of compulsion in installing them, with socialisation of the costs, if this is not to be a source of growing inequality.

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*And even less often do I agree with Dr B.Ching, but he is on the nose this week with an article on one major reason why doing railway work costs too much.