Fossil fuels under fire
Over the next 10-15 years, there’s going to be a lot of political pressure globally brought to bear on car manufacturers to make three key changes.
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The first will be to achieve significantly higher efficiency standards – raising the miles per gallon to enable cars to travel farther with less fuel consumed.
The second is to develop vehicles that run on alternative sources of energy, such as solar, electric or hydrogen-powered engines. The third is to automate driving, or to take the human element out of the driver’s seat as much as possible.
Today, we focus on the drive to eliminate humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels by turning our sights onto Norway, where recent media reports pointed to a possible plan to ban cars from Oslo’s city centre by 2019, ultimately aiming to reduce the sale of gas-powered cars to zero by the year 2025.
It eventually emerged that though there will be no outright ban, the intent will be a raft of measures (such as subsidies, charging stations, hydrogen infrastructure and differentiated rush-hour taxes) designed to make owning and driving old gas-guzzlers much more difficult, while promoting zero-emission vehicles in their place.
Instead of banning petrol-engined vehicles outright therefore, the plan is to make the alternatives much more attractive to buy.
Going forward, the key to ridding our cities of cars is to provide plentiful alternatives, and to make car use as painful and inconvenient as possible. People still need to get around and just banning cars will leave them stranded. With this in mind, Norway looks to have quite a holistic plan lined up.
They are already promoting alternate methods of transport, with plans for a new billion-dollar network of bike highways and the ban on cars in Oslo’s city centre. London is also investing in electric delivery vehicles and Paris is banning old cars from entering the city on weekdays.
It would be quite ironic if Norway became the first country to go completely gas-free, as it is one of the world’s biggest oil producers and the largest oil producer in Europe.
As wild as these intentions may sound, Norway is not the only government considering a ban of internal combustion vehicles – India and the Netherlands have similar objectives. Norway’s energy and economic profile makes the push particularly intriguing, though.
Although it produces more than 90per cent of its local energy from renewable hydropower – allowing it to power electric cars cleanly – it is simultaneously Europe’s largest petroleum producer, with fossil fuels accounting for 45per cent of exports and 20per cent of GDP.
Were Norway to transition to a fully electric auto fleet, it would become, at least through the lens of the Paris climate accords, the geopolitical equivalent of a drug dealer that refuses to touch their own product.
So far, the policy language simply includes suggestions and recommendations for ambitious goals to reduce emissions from the transport sector.
The country's leaders are trying "to encourage more environmentally friendly vehicles by using the carrot instead of stick," with the expectation that new technology, rather than bans, will be responsible for the natural decline of gas and diesel engines.
The end of fossil fuels is not about to happen anytime soon and will not be caused by running out of any of them. There is more than enough to fry the planet several times over, and technological progress in the extraction of fossil fuels has recently been at least as fast as for renewables. We fortunately live in an age of fossil fuel abundance.
In the next 10-15 years, next generation solar power is likely to play a key part in this sort of climate-conscious transformation.
There will be equal influence from driverless and electric cars, new batteries for the home and for the intermittent generators, smart grids, smart meters and a host of changes in the demand side, induced by the changes being brought about through new materials like graphene, new processes (like 3D printing), and new automation methods like robotics.
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