Labour Politician Talks Sense....shocker!

[ToraToraTora]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34407670
Time to hike the tax on Diesel? ....and before all the truckers have a fit , I propose that non car usage by commercial firms are able to reclaim the extra duty.

[dave50]

You must be joking! What about everyone who already has a diesel car and uses it to get to work? Why should they be penalised over some spurious pollution claims by the usual tree huggers? Dont even think about it.

[Noe-schitt]

Sound to me like some businessperson trying to create a positive climate for his own business interests

[ToraToraTora]

Dave: because they are driving filthy noisy polluting machines. They will be encouraged to sell but they won't get much, in the end they'll all get scrapped and we can end this ridiculous diesel car experiment. Give it a few years and car builders will stop producing them anyway. Cities like Paris are already talking about banning them, if that spreads then the scrappers will start to fill up with diesel cars and we can get back to normal.

[anotheoldgit]

dave50

And I wonder how many of those diesel car owners, are the ones who constantly go on about the small amount of dangerous fumes that smokers give out?

Seems very hypocritical to me, even as a non-smoker.

[Gromit]

Deisel is again acknowledged to be dirtier when compared with petrol. But it is not entirely clear cut yet. Deisel engines are much more efficent than petrol, so they use less fossil fuel. And they give off less CO2 than petrol. However, they emit more of other pollutants such as NO2. Changing from deisel to petrol is rather like just swapping one poison for another.

A scrappage scheme for anyone buying an electric vehicle, trading in their deisel and petrol vehicles, is the way ahead.

[Gromit]

AOG

You are being rather unfair to deisel drivers. They were tricked when they made their purchase decision. They believed they were biying a cleaner vehicle. People who smoke cigarettes near none smokers are not trying to go for the cleanest option. They know before they make their purchase that cigarettes are harmful to people around them.
So your call out of hypocrisy does not stand up.

[ToraToraTora]

I'm not so sure about the lecky argument. you only get about a 5th of the energy used to generate the electricity so electric cars are in effect 500% worse than using the base fuel directly, but it does take the polution out of the town and coal powered cars a impractical! I think the way forward is the electric car that you can charge at home but it also has a small petrol engine to charge the batteries when you don't have a charging source. That way electric cars will be convenient too. But there are huge problems with battery life and the pollutants generated when building such vehicles. For example some of the materials used in a prius are created in very toxic processes. It has been said that to build 1 prius creates far more pollution than running a huge gas guzzler for it's life time.

[Noe-schitt]

Unfortunately, the pollution caused by electric / hybrid vehicles at the present time makes them no better

[ToraToraTora]

well noe-schitt, I do remember the Prius/M3 test and the Prius used more fuel than the M3 so you may well be right.

[Noe-schitt]

The main cause of pollution is in the manufacture, batteries in particular and the extraction of rare earth metals

[Gromit]

Elecricty can be made from renewables and nuclear, where emissions are virtually nil. Most people will recharge during their night time when they are asleep, when fossil fuel generation is at its minimum.

In terms of batteries using rare resources, this is true, but the batteries will almost certainly be recycled after their lifetime rather than discarded.

Politically, zero emission vehicles are desirable in cities with many residents, and more cities than Paris will ban dirty fossil fuel vehicles, in the future.

[Noe-schitt]

At the moment it is not economically viable to recycle lithium it is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process so I doubt that will be an option. Future battery chemistries may hold the key but only if they can be manufactured cleanly

[ToraToraTora]

fair enough gromit, the problem though remains and that is range and charging availability. Having the small engine to charge the batteries means you can get home if you go flat and cannot find a charge station.

[Gromit]

Lithium batteries are uneconomic to recycle at the moment because there is not the economy of scale. There is actually less than 3% Lithium in the battery at manufacture, and recovery of such a small quantity is not viable on a small scale. If large lithium batteries start to get discard in large quantities, then recycling will become more viable.

Tora,
Work needs to be done on extending capacity and charging times. But that will happen.

[Noe-schitt]

There are only few pilot plants at the moment and they are only at a demonstration stage so any comprehensive recycling process is a few years away apart from the fact that as you said lithium is only a small part of the manufacture and there are many other pollutants created in the manufacture

[tonyav]

Lord Drayson, whose own business invests in clean energy


Says it all really.

[Old_Geezer]

Screwing scapegoats with tax demands is rarely, if ever, "sense".
Abuse maybe.

[youngmafbog]

It's pointless taxing people unless there is a viable alternative. And at present unfortunately there isn't.

[Zacs-Master]

Maybe a more sensible approach, rather than proposing to penalise innocent victims, would be to work out what the additional tax would have been, and charge the manufacturers.