Ireland Declares Climate Emergency

[318is-joe]

There are definitely things that we as a species are doing spectacularly wrong. Plastic is absolutely everywhere, comes from oil you know, so what is all the wrapping doing to the two courgettes you buy in a tray and wrapped in film doing to the carbon footprint of two courgettes?
The entire E vehicle thing for me is a complete crock, we could have windmills all day but where the hell does the power to charge these e-vehicles come from?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/...el-3-inventory
If you want to get technical about it, the laws of thermodynamics dictate that every time you convert one energy form to another, energy is constant, it cannot be lost. It can and does get converted into other forms depend on how it is transmitted - it's not for nothing that main power get's converted to high tension (still with losses associated with heat) and the phrase "cooking on gas" didn't come from nothing!
What I'm saying is, the closer you can harness the stoichiometric energy of a fuel the more efficient it is. If you burn Gas to create 2 KW's then transmit it from a power station on a HT transmission network it "could" lose .5Kw thats 25% loss before it ever has to trickle into a battery to be further depleted before being used - aside form the fact the carbon footprint of just making an e-vehicle exceed running a diesel for it's typical lifetime.
You could go nuclear and we probably are (even though we don't admit it in Ireland) that cable between wales and Ireland doesn't mean we are proponents for nuclear fission technology. they just do it in wales and uk. We're green!

[Big H]

aside form the fact the carbon footprint of just making an e-vehicle exceed running a diesel for it's typical lifetime.

Therin lies a big issue - mulltiple journalists investigting same have been stonewalled by the manufacturers. What is the end-to-end CO2 output from an electric vehicle ?

What is the carbon footprint from mining the lithium/other elements from the ground that go into e-car batteries, coupled with the manufacturing/assembly process ? Nobody truely knows and the vehicle manufacturers are certainly not going to/probably never will divulge this info.....

[Andy]

Therin lies a big issue - mulltiple journalists investigting same have been stonewalled by the manufacturers. What is the end-to-end CO2 output from an electric vehicle ?

What is the carbon footprint from mining the lithium/other elements from the ground that go into e-car batteries, coupled with the manufacturing/assembly process ? Nobody truely knows and the vehicle manufacturers are certainly not going to/probably never will divulge this info.....

For once we are in agreement

[CitizenKane]

Interesting reading this morning: https://www.independent.ie/news/envi...-38224591.html

Although there is no doubt an element of scaremongering with that headline as I don't think things like congestion charges or EV-only zones are going to be implemented overnight on foot of this report.

My concern at the moment though is the lack of certainty. I've been striving to own an M car for years and was hoping to finally get one next year - but reading things like this makes me wonder if I should just give up on that idea altogether and go find another hobby...

[318 iS Cosmos]

Ok, maybe it because I'm in a very optimistic mood today and potentially very unrealistic too, but surely this is their chance to scrap motor tax and just put a big duty on fuel instead. Like I said, unrealistic but stranger things have happened...

[ian-909]

“Plans to introduce legislation to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2030”

https://www.rte.ie/news/environment/...e-action-plan/

[CitizenKane]

“Plans to introduce legislation to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2030”

https://www.rte.ie/news/environment/...e-action-plan/

I assume that’s just new car sales, as otherwise banning people from selling their cars second hand would be a pretty severe violation of constitutional rights of property ownership...

[kdevitt]

No NCTs will be provided for petrol / diesel car after 2045. Its a good way off - so who knows what will have happened by then. Maybe someone will crack the hydrogen fuel cell and we can continue to drive our cars and just emit water!

[spike]

nissan, toyota, merc, and a few more are running trials on hydrogen cars,

[CitizenKane]

No NCTs will be provided for petrol / diesel car after 2045. Its a good way off - so who knows what will have happened by then. Maybe someone will crack the hydrogen fuel cell and we can continue to drive our cars and just emit water!

It's a long way off for sure until they completely ban them, but my fear in the short term is they could very quickly cease to be viable through taxation, particularly in this country where we already pay such a high premium to run a car. For example if you lived in the UK where it costs £20 a year to tax a diesel car in the lowest band, or £500 a year to tax an e92 M3, then increases in taxation or the cost of fuel, etc. of the type that are coming down the tracks here would be a lot easier to swallow.

Of course we could also seek to offset the burden of this somewhat by decreasing income tax and abolishing USC, etc. but the chances of that are virtually zero now the government pretty much has a carte blanche to tax us into oblivion as a result of this climate emergency. Unfortunately as is always the way with socialist big government, if the options to incentivise something (such as EVs) are to either decrease the cost of that thing or to increase the cost of everything else, the latter will tend to prevail (which aligns with the stated objective of this plan is to "force" private motorists off the road).