<div></div> British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is considering weakening the UK’s commitments to net zero in a bombshell policy shift. more… The post In a ‘bone-headed’ move, the UK to roll back gas car phase-out and other net zero policies appeared first on Electrek.
Man what the fuck happened to the UK over the past 10 years? You guys have properly lost it.
Conservative politicians. The same all over the planet, greedy evil selfish shitheads. Served by their base who are mostly greedy evil selfish shitheads too.
They use wedge issues to maintain power in our ‘first past the post’ system. They’re desperately trying to latch onto and exacerbate any wedge issues between now and Jan 2025 in a desperate bid to stay in office. I warned my friends of this a couple of years ago.
Old vs young (pensions triple lock, inheritance tax); straight vs lgbt; lgb and angry straights vs trans; middle class vs ‘scrounger’ lower class; residents vs immigrants; these are the wedges they are trying to exploit.
It has really gone to shit with these rolling Tory governments where every Tom, Dick and Harry in the party gets a turn at making everyone’s lives demonstrably worse.
Serving the Con
good question
most people want to jump and scream “brexit!” and yes, brexit isn’t helpful, but it’s a symptom of bigger problems.
the most recent problem is that, the UK embarked on the “government austerity program” since 2010. this means that, the government slashed spending on most government provided services, ostensibly to pay off the UK national debt. in practice, this meant sharply reducing spending on social security, cancelling school building projects and restorations, sharply reducing police and prison spending, reducing funding to local governments, and increasing national sales tax (VAT).
end result? take a look at this graph, showing the number of hunger charity/food bank users increase over time. note that it was basically nobody at the start of the austerity program, and now it’s several cities worth of people.
it’s almost as if, when you cut government services that people rely on… that… people start suffering?
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if you pull on the thread of history, there are reasons why austerity was done, and there were reasons that those reasons were done, and so on. i’m happy to talk about it at length but i’m also trying to catch and prevent myself from “longposting”.
the short answer is that, successive UK governments over 50 years have sold everything in the proverbial house to pawnbrokers and vultures, to prop up an unsustainable drug addiction (winning general elections). the result is now there is nothing left to sell, they maxed out all the credit cards, and now the debt collectors are coming.
there’s a nice line from this article that sums up my opinion on the issue:
…in today’s UK economy, whose underlying stagnation has been masked only by the release of excess liquidity on an oceanic scale, some deficit spending may be good – necessary, even.
“release of excess liquidity” is an understatement here. we sold everything to the highest bidder, and now we’re fucked.
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here’s some hot topic examples of some things that are fucked, for further reading:
the police are now in “murders only” mode, only 4% of crime is actually being prosecuted because they just don’t have the resources to investigate anything anymore. even if you do the investigation yourself, and give the evidence over, they just shrug.
most sewage is now dumped directly into rivers and oceans, because we sold off the water utilities and now they have no real oversight. remember, the police are in murders-only mode? who’s going to prosecute them? nobody, lol
a lot of schools and other buildings are at threat of literal collapse, because we cheaped out on the material to build them. each successive government wanted to win an election, so none of them thought to mention it to us.
the queue for healthcare is so long, that 120,000 people in the queue for surgeries and treatment are… just dying, because they don’t get seen in time. (granted, some of these are oldies who were going to die anyway, but the figure has doubled in 5 years.)
lastly, here’s some further watching on how tax works over here, it’s pretty messed up
Wow what the hell.
Have you guys tried just giving everybody guns and hoping that the crime goes away? I heard that works really well.
/S
Weak leadership, weak government, weak country.
As arrogant as we can be, I don’t understand how anyone couldn’t be embarrassed about the current state of the country.
And yet you people will vote that party in come next election, I guarantee it.
It’s far from guaranteed, but it is a risk. The bigger problem is that national discourse has been dragged so far to the right that the alternative party (Labour) won’t be the breath of fresh air that we so desperately need.
Who even benefits from this? Even Toyota is on the EV train.
The Tories themselves? They saw the petrolheads getting all worked up over the London ulez extension and decided to go for their votes. That’s all I can think of.
Probably folks who can’t afford new cars.
Then why don’t they buy a second hand EV?
Probably because by the time most folks sell their EV’s, they need new batteries, which aren’t cheap and add a lot to the cost of the vehicle. Depending on the EV, the cost of a replacement battery can vary between $5,000 and $20,000.
Jeremy Clarkson
It’s from all those years of brainwashing from top gear…
Morons. That is all
I’m sorry for language, though as a Briton my best reaction is along the lines of: “you’re joking, right? Diiiickhead.” (I apologise again for not being familiar with phonetics to express my disdain more appropriately).
Given how outrageously expensive BEVs are, it makes sense to not require them anytime soon. One would simply be pricing the lower classes out of a vehicle.
If nobody could afford to buy a car because of this, what do you think would happen? A) The economy would grind to a halt as nobody could get to work anymore without a gas car or B) The auto manufacturers would miraculously figure out a way to sell cars at a profit for cheaper just in time?
If nobody could afford to buy a car because of this, what do you think would happen?
I would expect the government to delay the implementation of the requirement, just like we see in this thread.
I know what you’re saying but the plan is to ban new sales of internal combustion cars from 2030, so you’ll be able to buy second hand ice cars until a good 20 years after that. Seems ok to me?
The higher prices filter into the used market. A used Model 3 costs more than a used Corolla. Go check your local listiings.
Climate policy is important, but you cannot just price people out of necessary items like transportation.
There are new electric cars that are $15,000 cheaper than the model 3. I’m so sick of people looking at electric cars and picking the $50,000+ models as if they were representative of the whole EV market, just pretending the $36,000 models aren’t already real.
What BEV is cheaper than the same speced ICE? They are universally more expensive, which carries into the used market. Get the price of BEVs down and you won’t have to worry about pricing the lower classes out of a used car in the future by killing the production of inexpensive cars.
Those prices will go down with time, like in about 7 years.
Second hand ice cars will still be available. The idea is by the time they aren’t, BEV has come down.
No one woul get priced out mate. You don’t think that employers or the government would foot the bill if it came to it? Employers need money and employees. Governments need money and employers. They wouldn’t just let the nation fall apart. Sure, your current paradigm leading to a known apocalypse would have to change, but this would be the catalyst.
People would have to start taking public transit to work. Or biking. Or God forbid walking. Things need to change, and this pussyfooting policy of “Oooooh, we can’t change toooo fast and make people uncooooomfortable” bullshit needs to stop.
Some older BEVs are just entering the range of affordable. But more importantly, the more new BEVs are bought, the more there will be coming onto the second hand market in 5, 10. 20 years’ time.
The market would enter that space, if you have to buy something they want it to be theirs. There is literally no point in making something you cannot afford, I get what you’re saying there are some stupid policies surrounding EV take up but if everyone had to have one in 5 years there would be a range available for every level.
Given that we don’t have the lithium production for that many batteries and we aren’t ramping up fast enough to support 100% car demand with BEVs in just a few years, no, they would not be magically cheaper.
But it wouldn’t be immediate even if was legislated, there is a timeline and all the manufacturers in the world would be competing to get in. Not every single car would change, some people will drive theirs into the ground and not everyone will buy new and some will make the decision not to buy at all. It’s alarmist to just say that it’s impossible when there are steps being made every day to make it a reality.
Not every single car would change
Correct, just the new cars. And we don’t have enough lithium for all new cars to be BEVs in the next several years. We are upping lithium processing, but it isn’t fast enough for that aggressive of a timeline.
And that is why most EV manufacturers are creating batteries that don’t require lithium and other heavy metals.
We are ramping up though. There are something like 50 new battery factories under construction in Europe alone. The US has ~30 going up as well.
Since when did the government give a shit about lower classes?
But they have actual cheap EVs in Europe, unlike the US. Like the Dacia spring and other Chinese imports.
Nobody’s banning the sale of secondhand ICE cars, they would have still been sold as new up to the end of 29, so there would be a good supply of used cars for more than a decade post that.
Second hand EV prices have been returning to more normal prices in the UK, and I would expect that downward trend to continue as we see greater availability on the secondhand market. Cars that were 10k last year can be had for almost half that this year.
Finance in the UK of new (and nearly new) cars is heavily dependent on lease style agreements with the total cost massively offset by future value (thus EVs had been fantastic value new on finance) and the liability held by the car finance company. At the moment they had been trying to hold used prices to offset that liability, it hasn’t been working very well with dealers left with cars they can’t sell without losing big time.
