I also believe this is primarily driven by money, but also a section of Norwegian society seems to believe that anything new and shiny simply must be bought and right away.
In a country in which environmental concerns are marketed as paramount by the government and media there are some obvious dichotomies emerging.
For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. But ok, a solution to fossil fuels had to be found and that's it. For two, the mobile carriers in Norway are heavily promoting phone contracts in which every year you send in your phone and get the latest model phone in exchange. This has to be one of the least environmentally friendly ideas of this century. Every 12 months you exchange a phone that contains plastics and metals and is shipped from another continent just to have the latest piece of bling. Yet no-one seems to care. Another examples is that the speed limit on the motorways was raised a couple of years ago from 100 kph max to 110. So we're all burning too much fuel but now we're being told it's ok to burn more and faster. It doesn't add up. I am meant to care about the environment or not? Or does the environment only count when people can profit from it?
The radio swap over is the same. It looks to a conspiracy theorist like an attempt to shame people in "old" cars into replacing them with a "see, I'm not poor!" model. There have been reports in the news here over the years about there being so many old cars on the roads and that it is a problem (it is presented as a safety and environmental problem by the govt. and media). The reason I think there are so many older cars is because new cars cost a lot mostly because tax on a new car is so high, and this leads to owners actually following service intervals and keeping cars in good condition. Finding a car with a near complete service history in Norway is common. Maybe there would be less old cars if the govt. wasn't taxing them so high. An electric car is still out my price range, even with the (now vulgar) tax breaks given to Tesla owners.
> For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly.
This is the kind of made up on spot arguments you hear from ICE vehicle owners. Until they switch to EV :)
"Manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in about 15 percent more emissions than manufacturing an equivalent gasoline vehicle."
15pct is not anywhere enough to offset the lifetime footprint of a fossils-driven vehicle, especially in case of Norway where effectively all electricity is hydro.
Sort of just what I said. I did state "reportedly" and not provide any sources. I don't think I was being unfair to the EV market. However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport. Public transport is something I could have mentioned in my original post as it is not prioritized enough here in Norway and car culture is. If the govt were serious, really serious about the environment then public transport would be much better than it is currently.
Edit: I just remembered another reason why I think EV is about money and not only about the environment: diesel engines could easily(ish) be adapted to run on renewable plant based fuel[1], but no govt is interested in promoting this. In fact they do the opposite, they tax the end user quite highly for pouring vegetable oil into cars even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free. The conversions wouldn't be very much more than when leaded fuel was phased out and we all put new heads on our petrol engines (in the Land Rover community at least we did this). New diesel motors could be manufactured to specs able to cope with plant based fuel (especially with a bit of engineering enterprise). If some one can give a good answer as to why this has never been a viable option except for hobbyists I would be interested to read it.
edit 2: without govt. or trade backing this company doing said conversions folded 3 years ago. But what a future we might have seen. http://www.dieselveg.com/
Anti-environmental conspiracy theories (the evil electric car lobby are ruining the business of the nice oil providers for no good reason) aren't really any more useful than environmental conspiracy theories and biases ("chemicals" are bad, "natural" means good etc).
EVs are better for the environment, both local and global, than ICE cars. That's true on average and even truer for Norway with its cleaner grid.
Biodiesals etc. should really be saved for the things that can't be easily electrified, like flying craft. But, at this very moment I believe various places including the US mandate that the diesel is mixed with these fuels to a certain percentage, so there's no big conspiracy here against this type of fuel.
If someone buys a brand new EV then a) presumably they would have bought a brand new ICE instead, b) they do not set their older car on fire and push it over a cliff, but rather sell it to someone, who in turn sells their car to somoene else. In the end, particularly with punitive tax incentives in place, the oldest, least-safe, least-efficient, most polluting cars in the system are scrapped.
> things that can't be easily electrified, like flying craft
Funfact about airplanes: they can pretty easily be converted to run on liquid hydrogen. There was a big Airbus-led research project on this some years back. IIRC they found overall efficiency (when accounting for larger fuel volume etc. etc.) was ~4% lower than normal aircraft.
Not to mention that Tupolev actually built and flew a full-scale proof of concept liquid H2 airliner in the late 80's, the TU-155; sadly yet another cool project that died with the Soviet Union.
What about the fuel tanks that would be required for a hypothetical hydrogen aircraft? Unlike kerosene, hydrogen is very light, but the high-pressure tank to contain the hydrogen is quite heavy. Plus, given hydrogen's very low volumetric density, I imagine you'd have to sacrifice a lot of the cargo volume of the aircraft to fit the H2 fuel tank.
Liquid hydrogen is the key. It's frickin' cold, as in liquid nitrogen is positively tropical in comparison, but the density is high enough that you just need slightly larger wing volume for tanks. Vacuum based insulation, which is what they use, is pretty light.
As I said, Airbus did a large R&D project on this and they concluded it's technically and economically feasible for passenger jets. I'm taking their word for it, seeing as they build airplanes for a living.
That is cool, though currently there's no low carbon source of Hydrogen. Possibly over time excess wind an solar power can be used to generate liquid fuels.
There's steam methane reforming from natural gas; it converts methane to CO2 and H2, and you separate those. This is already a large scale commercial process (e.g. used for hardening fat in food or upgrading petroleum to fuel), giving tens of millions of tonnes per year, and recent plants even include CO2 capture and storage, making it a low carbon source.
One could - from a narrow perspective[1] - argue that diesel engines on plant oil would be carbon-neutral but not that they are emission free. In fact: (older) diesel engines are being banned from cities (e.g. Antwerp, Belgium) not because of CO2-emissions but due to emissions of particulates (and NOx). CO2 is a global problem, but particulates and NOx are local problems (and hence more likely to trigger local political action).
[1] it is often argued that biomass/biofuel is not entirely carbon-neutral due to several reasons: the inherent lifecycle means some CO2 is in the atmosphere at any point; production is often based on CO2-emitting processes ...
Secondly some other issues pop up as well: (indirect) land use change, competition with food ...
Well thanks for the well-reasoned and neatly laid out rebuffal, it's what I come to HN for. Perhaps "free from harmful emissions" would be better, I'm not in that field of expertise so I can't say, but if you take issue with plant based fuel over fossil fuels then I would like to hear that rational: preferably in a one word answer sans context. /bitchy
The better response would be (theoretically) "carbon neutral": as long as that diesel is run strictly on biomass-based fuels, the carbon cycle would be completed (it would would be "net zero" in pollution).
That doesn't mean it would be "pollution free", of course; no vehicle can be. For a diesel, you have various gases and particulates, but with proper capture and scrubbing, much of these can be disposed of in more environmentally friendly ways. Plus, most if not all of this tech is already developed and used on current diesel vehicles.
I actually agree that it's all about money. An average citizen cares for environment in abstract, but not enough to pay premium for it. What we have in Norway with EVs is government incentives for adoption at work.
With biodiesel I remember there used to be some debate how much it can harm the food crops supply if the prices are competitive. So at least that is a concern. And specifically in Norway diesel is penalized for a while now, ironically after being promoted by the government for years before that.
There was some old regulations on the books that allowed EVs to drive toll free and use buss lanes during rush hour.
Hardly anyone cared when it was introduced, because the major EV available were Think compacts.
But when Tesla introduced their sports car, suddenly everyone monied individual in the cities took interest. Because it was still a EV according to regulations, so now they could drive something that looked and performed just like the gas guzzler the neighbor had, get around tolls and rush hour traffic, and pretend to care about the environment.
> ...even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free.
This just isn't true. Local emissions of bio-diesel are comparable to petro-diesel.
When you factor in that C02 is absorbed during manufacture, biodiesel is estimated to have 45%-65% lower net emissions than petro-diesel, but that ignores the fact that you just repurposed viable farmland (or in some cases rainforest) and changed its C02 profile, potentially reducing or erasing any net benefit.
Money is how we align priorities although our individual wants and needs vary dramatically.
I don't think there are any major initiatives around that are compelling people to junk cars in favor of EVs. We do have subsidies that are "priming the pump" to ramp up production volumes and build enough economies of scale to make EVs a thing. That's a good thing IMO as many driving use cases are well met by EVs.
IMO, plant based fuels are problematic due to the affects they'll have on the agriculture market. I would prefer to see subsidy to make natural gas replace diesel fleets. Alot of needless human suffering is attributable to diesel particulate emissions.
> However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport.
I don't know about Norway specifically, but in Western Europe in general (Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland etc.) old cars are sold to less well-off EU countries, where they're still in operation for (typically) many more years. So, the Western consumer changing cars every 5 years isn't actually affecting the environment, and is actually helping out folks in poorer economies.
It should be enough to compare the number of yearly cars bought vs salvaged in say Germany (the difference should be the export, presumably to poorer economies). Unfortunately, I don't speak German (or French, Dutch etc.), but here are the Polish buy-side stats:
This article says that the number of USED cars imported to Poland in 2015 was around 1 million:
Which means that roughly 70% cars in Poland are used ones coming from (mostly) Western Europe.
You could also come at it from another angle. Consider that a 5-10 year old car can still easily be worth 20-50% of its initial value. Who in their right mind would scrap it, when you can sell on the second-hand market? You don't see these cars on streets of Zurich or Paris, but come to most Polish cities and you'll be surrounded by them (a lot of them still have various stickers in German on them, as people don't bother to peel them off).
It's not 15% when you already have a gasoline vehicle that you propose to discard. It's 115%, because the alternative is to keep what you have. You can't unproduce what you have.
Keep old car: 0% the emissions of producing it
Buy new gasoline car: 100% the emissions to produce it
Buy new electric car: 115% the emissions to produce a gasoline car
> I also believe this is primarily driven by money
Quite likely. I am not sure exactly when it came to be, but at some point the national broadcaster, NRK, transferred maintenance and such of the broadcast network to Telenor.
While Telenor is on paper the national telecom company, it has since the late 90s operated as a publically traded company with the government as a major share holder.
So what is likely going on is that Telenor has found the older FM equipment expensive to maintain, and thus want to replace it with DAB. Quite likely because they can then extract rent from all the extra channels being broadcast.
We had a similar transition to digital TV a few years back, and as best i can tell the analog channels were barely turned off before Telenor started lobbying for the frequency space to be put up for auction aimed towards mobile phone networks.
Damn it, Telenor was making noise about replacing the landlines with mobile phones for a while. This because their switches in and around the major cities were getting old. They seem to have dropped the idea though, likely because they noticed they would have to put up a whole lot of new mobile cells to cover all those villages tucked away in narrow valleys.
Frankly big business in Norway has gotten very brazen about their milking of the population for all sorts of rents.
They seem to have gotten around the problem of switching landlines to mobile by simply increasing the cost of a landline so that consumers willingly give it up. I remember our package cost of mobile, net and landline made keeping the landline viable, until it was no longer included in the package and then it increased in cost until we retired it. Iirc the cost of the landline doubled over ~5 years.
I lived in DK, it's similar there (+ car tax is higher there). I think this new shiny culture is great in some regards: almost cashless society, very good tech in schools and Universities, very good IT in all companies, etc.. However, they also have the biggest contradictions I have seen so far: super old car fleet - but everybody in DK is an environmentalist; immigrants "ghetto" all over - but everybody in DK is supposed to be nice and welcoming; 80% of what they eat is junk cheap food from fast foods, but everybody in DK only buys bio products at the supermarkets.
I think you just have to accept the fact that many people don't see those contradictions, our brains are made for patterns, they have a bit of a loser concept of internal coherency.
New cars were still going to be built though so it's better that they are electrical, especially when you have 100% clean energy to source it (dam hydro).
The 24 month upgrade cycle is hardly unique to Norway; Australia being another where everyone and his dog gets a new phone biannually.
1. Tax breaks and other incentives boost new sales, so the number of new cars is higher than if the market had continued as before. There is an argument for that having an impact.
2. Not 24 months, 12. And it encourages people who would not have upgraded for years to upgrade every year, year on year.Do you really need a new phone every 12 months?
1. As it's only the electric cars that receive your incentives, it's a very worthwhile push to clean energy. Also the first generation of these cars will make it to the 2nd hand market about now, further increasing the penetration. Number of new cars might have been lower without, but the percentage of electric cars would have been a mere fraction. (Edit: And filthy diesel cars would likely be the ersatz).
2. Oh, right, 12 months - me bad. Yep that is pretty awful. I'm coming up on 24 months on my own but could really stretch it longer with my S6 Edge being a great phone.
(As a PS my Rotel / Infinity hi-fi system is 21 years old now, and going strong.)
For a 1 year old phones it's Reused not recycled. When you hand in a six year old phone that's when they need to be recycled and that costs a little money. So, old phones do end up in piles as actually recycling is more expensive than saying they will some day be recycled.
In a country in which environmental concerns are marketed as paramount by the government and media there are some obvious dichotomies emerging.
For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. But ok, a solution to fossil fuels had to be found and that's it. For two, the mobile carriers in Norway are heavily promoting phone contracts in which every year you send in your phone and get the latest model phone in exchange. This has to be one of the least environmentally friendly ideas of this century. Every 12 months you exchange a phone that contains plastics and metals and is shipped from another continent just to have the latest piece of bling. Yet no-one seems to care. Another examples is that the speed limit on the motorways was raised a couple of years ago from 100 kph max to 110. So we're all burning too much fuel but now we're being told it's ok to burn more and faster. It doesn't add up. I am meant to care about the environment or not? Or does the environment only count when people can profit from it?
The radio swap over is the same. It looks to a conspiracy theorist like an attempt to shame people in "old" cars into replacing them with a "see, I'm not poor!" model. There have been reports in the news here over the years about there being so many old cars on the roads and that it is a problem (it is presented as a safety and environmental problem by the govt. and media). The reason I think there are so many older cars is because new cars cost a lot mostly because tax on a new car is so high, and this leads to owners actually following service intervals and keeping cars in good condition. Finding a car with a near complete service history in Norway is common. Maybe there would be less old cars if the govt. wasn't taxing them so high. An electric car is still out my price range, even with the (now vulgar) tax breaks given to Tesla owners.