EV owners to pay Tax.....

[Carlton green]

Is this a case study of the dark arts of spin?

What looks like an unattributed policy is floated buried in a broader Daily Mail article and it's already being discussed as though it were gospel. We're getting Trip to Bangor (And all for under a pound you know) with possibly turnpikes to come.

I fancy with things like this, the politicians behind it look for the responses: the level of ire provoked compared with level of indifference or approval. Beyond that, if it is coming, then those who will lose out are already softened up

Yes, as is I suspect often the case, I rather think that those is a case of ‘let’s see’ before we say.

The simple nub of this is that car ownership and driving is far too cheap and a classic 'tragedy of the commons' has resulted. The solutions to this can be either market oriented (charge more), regulation oriented (restrict/apportion usage) or some mix of both, but either way you slice it, the utility (in the economic sense) of driving has to come down.

I’m opposed to the idea of rationing by the size of someone’s wallet. It might end up working that way but to my mind such a situation lacks sufficient fairness. Figuratively beating people whose life and lifestyle has been shaped by and is dependant upon car use seems daft to me and will lead to a backlash. Helping people and changing their choices to tolerably better ones is the only way forward where success is next to guaranteed.

[al_yrpal]

TC, well observed. And, a lot of that going on before the mini budget.... No doubt there will be a howl of disapproval from the many poorly informed eco loons.

Al

[Nearholmer]

Obviously the dreary car dependent suburban sprawl that exists in places (e.g. most of the south east outside the M25) is a thornier issue to unpick.

It’s not just the suburbs. Once population density is below a certain (quite high) level, serving transport needs other than by personal transport gets increasingly difficult/expensive, especially given that we spent 50+ years shaping everything, where we work, where we live, where shops are, the location of hospitals, even the location of schools to some extent, around ‘personal hypermobility’.

It can or could all be re-shaped in a greener way, and Jonathon Porrit wrote a very good book on it about forty years ago highlighting some of the ways that could be done, but it’s neither a five minute project, or one that I’ve noticed anybody doing very much about. The thing that leaves me aghast is that where big development is going on right now, it isn’t being done in a way that fosters sustainability at the broad level, it’s all teeny measures like the odd bike path and using fewer bricks, which are necessary, but about as far from sufficient as you can imagine.

[pete75]

Not sure why car batteries would be any different to any other li ion battery regarding recycling, other than as large pre made packs they can do some reuse in other areas first. Extracting the metals out is not tricky, though it is largely just the metals that are recycled at the moment as far as I'm aware.

According to this, 80% of the entire battery can be recycled and 95% of the "valuable" metals therein.
https://www.fortum.com/products-and-ser ... 0batteries.

[al_yrpal]

The thing that leaves me aghast is that where big development is going on right now, it isn’t being done in a way that fosters sustainability at the broad level, it’s all teeny measures like the odd bike path and using fewer bricks, which are necessary, but about as far from sufficient as you can imagine.

That isnt universally true. Yesterday we visited a new development which will eventually 2500 new homes. On the plans there is a primary school, a park and ride, a local centre of small shops and a care home. There is plenty of open space, kids playgrounds etc. But, even the 4 bed houses are pokey, no wardrobe space, pitifully small gardens, everybody crammed in. The developers are advertising the houses "trade in your Victorian home and save 65% on heating bills"........no thanks!

Al

[thirdcrank]

TC, well observed. And, a lot of that going on before the mini budget.... No doubt there will be a howl of disapproval from the many poorly informed eco loons.

Al

Grateful as I am for the agreement, I'd have to say that I'd got you down as one of the leaders of the fings ain't what they used to be school of thought

[al_yrpal]

TC, yes, a lot of people assume all sorts of untruths that feed their personal prejudices. Beats me

Al

[Biospace]

Not sure why car batteries would be any different to any other li ion battery regarding recycling, other than as large pre made packs they can do some reuse in other areas first. Extracting the metals out is not tricky, though it is largely just the metals that are recycled at the moment as far as I'm aware.

According to this, 80% of the entire battery can be recycled and 95% of the "valuable" metals therein.
https://www.fortum.com/products-and-ser ... 0batteries.

I've read that presently around 1% of the lithium from those batteries which are recycled (which is suggested to be around 5%) is recovered.

It seems the more valuable metals are recovered to some extent, but it's a very energy intensive process. Which will mean fossil fuels, unless governments change the rules worldwide. The hopefuls are talking about 25%-40% of new car batteries using recycled materials by 2040. Economics dictate that most of this work will move to China, where environmental legislation is far less stringent than even in the US.

That lithium technology is already being rolled out for domestic use seems to be ignoring all the environmental considerations, where the extra mass and volume of traditional batteries is far less of a concern than in something which has to accelerate its own mass.

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/en ... -batteries
https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 21-00269-7

[robing]

EVs - most of the energy used by the National Grid to charge them still comes from gas.
And with gas in short supply and at a premium, and with petrol prices having come down a bit that is a big disadvantage.

[Biospace]

The simple nub of this is that car ownership and driving is far too cheap and a classic 'tragedy of the commons' has resulted.

Energy has been too cheap for too long. Allowing the poorest people the use of a car can be argued to have caused all sorts of social, environmental and problems (the same arguments can be used in even greater amounts for the cash-rich) but I see personal transport for all income levels something which should be a force for good.

Where it has gone wrong is governments failing to prevent the whole thing growing out of hand, power-wise, size-wise etc. The French have been most effective at discouraging powerful, inefficient cars. Unfortunately that is seen as something to be associated with Soviet Russia, but the success of the motor car has been allowed to ruin too much.

Worldwide, a different sort of vehicle ought to be in use within urban and suburban environments together with hugely impreoved public transport. Something which is barely more than half the width, a quarter of the power, a third of the mass of what the car has become.

Speed was originally something desirable because it implied efficiency and fine design, now roads have become so clogged, engines so powerful and the state photographing transgressions to inflate the pensions of a few, acceleration is the new speed. It's nonsense, since it requires massive batteries, wide tyres and reduces the brain of an adult to that of a child. And has an appalling effect on the environment.

Given the ultimate efficiency is how far you can travel on a unit of fuel, why shouldn't fuel efficiency become the figure to beat? Only a generation ago, owners of those cars which were far safer both in primary and secondary safety than your average Ford or Vauxhall, Peugeot or Fiat were near-oddities. Yet as soon as the crash videos and stats were posted online, car buyers started demanding safer cars.

[thirdcrank]

I was unfamiliar with the expression "tragedy of the commons" or else I'd forgotten, which is much the same thing.

However, I'm reminded of my dear old dad's quip "What would happen if everybody did it?" I first remember him saying that in the 1940s when I queried his instruction to stop throwing stones in the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, but it applies to car ownership in spades

[Biospace]

EVs - most of the energy used by the National Grid to charge them still comes from gas.
And with gas in short supply and at a premium, and with petrol prices having come down a bit that is a big disadvantage.

The number of plug in electric vehicles on UK roads breached the 1 million mark in September, according to the SMMT.

If one quarter of these were charging on a typical domestic charger at the rate of 7kW at the same time - not an impossibility - then they would account for nearly 2GW of demand on the grid, including typical losses. On a winter's evening, at peak demand, could that create problems?

I also wonder if there is the possibility gas will temporarily run short, there could be a request for EV owners not to charge unless absolutely necessary when there is no output from wind generation?

[pete75]

I was unfamiliar with the expression "tragedy of the commons" or else I'd forgotten, which is much the same thing.

However, I'm reminded of my dear old dad's quip "What would happen if everybody did it?" I first remember him saying that in the 1940s when I queried his instruction to stop throwing stones in the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, but it applies to car ownership in spades

That phrase was first used by some writer or other in the 1830s. What he describes may well have come about becuase, by then, much common land had been enclosed leaving far less land for commoners to graze their stock.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

[Mike Sales]

I understand the "tragedy of the commons" to refer to individuals following their own interests by over-exploiting a common resource, like a fish stock, whereas the general interest would be better served by conservation, or quotas. Wikipedia puts it like this.

In economics, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use,[1][2] act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.[3] The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd,[4] who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland.[5] The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968.[6] Faced with evidence of historical and existing commons, Hardin later retracted his original thesis, stating that the title should have been "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons".[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I am reading an interesting book about the drainage and enclosure of the Fens, Imperial Mud: the Fight for the Fens by James Boyce. The Fens were previously held as a usually well managed commons, but the tragedy here was confiscation of the commons by the powerful, not overexploitation.
Boyce sees the enclosure of the Fens, and enclosures generally, as a parallel to the colonial exploitations and dispossessions happening in North America and Australia at the same time.

[Carlton green]

Perhaps I am too questioning in my old age. It recently occurred to me that all land that is owned by someone was either originally unowned by a human or taken by either force or stealth from other human. Basically what land someone believes they own is, in fact, stolen property - makes ya’ think and (having bought my home) I’m not proposing change.