The world's largest auto market has a way of dictating the issue.
 

China set a deadline for automakers to finally end production and sales of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles. They will become the biggest market to implement it and that will accelerate their own electric vehicle industry led by companies including giants BYD Co. and BAIC Motor Corp. to produce EV types for home and world export markets. China will cap its carbon emissions by 2030 and stop their dangerous air pollution. They will join countries such as the U.K. and France and lead in phasing out vehicles using gasoline, diesel or any combustion-engine vehicles. Norway and the Netherlands are also considering a more aggressive strategy to put an end on fossil-fuel cars. Global EV manufacturers; Tesla Inc., Nissan Motor Co. and General Motors Co. are trying to grab a slice of the EV market in China, but local manufacturers that have found considerable and faster successes, largely from generous Chinese government subsidies.

https://interestingengineering.com/c...ssil-fuel-cars

So, better than the Paris Awards?

So Warren Buffett (who made a 7.2% return one day in his China electric car company at the announcement) pays how much to government officials to make an announcement that maybe someday they are going to do something else? I believe the other countries, I believe China about as far as I could throw them. I believe Warren Buffett likes money. Jimmy Buffett likes bars. China needs more bars. China needs more Jimmy Buffett, less Warren Buffett.

I'm not so sure if that is really going to happen so soon, but if it does happen I guess it's not going to be the end of cheap 125cc Chinese motorcycles (just consolidating CKD exports for other markets where the eventual ban on fossil fuels is going to come later).

Warren Buffet is a funny guy. Does he (or his company) still owe taxes? Everything I see is at least a year old, while he has said many times he should pay more taxes.

Nobody is stopping him, especially if the IRS keeps asking for more.

This guy? http://ecomodder.com/forum/attachmen...1&d=1505332640

China isn't doing this for Buffett.

China has been working a long time at both controlling emissions and curbing energy dependency. Once hostile to Western-imposed environmental regulations, they've made great headway into curbing pollution and investing in alternative energy... the Three Gorges Dam, their massive solar panel manufacturing concerns...

Buffett is only one investor in one EV manufacturer. Granted, it's the most successful one, but China is going all out on this. It knows that the EV revolution means huge profits for whoever controls the biggest market share before the ICE is banned... so they're working on cornering as much of that market share as possible before other countries ban the ICE.

Announcing that they eventually will ban the ICE isn't surprising for China. They're already further along into electrification than anyone else.

China might have already figured out Venezuela won't be able to drill all the oil worth its debt. You might have already known, most of the profits from Venezuelan oil exports were already compromised to pay loans contracted with China.

China is sewing up oil supplies for insurance.

This is the same reason they are so aggressively trying to co-opt the South China Sea from Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.

China does not have Russia's deep reserves of traditional oil, but it does have lots of coal and shale gas. Despite this, China is using those profits to invest in alternative energy.

Unlike the current US government, they're playing the long game. Shale gas doesn't last forever... and using those profits now to prepare for the post-coal/oil/gas market just makes sense. Put your eggs in different baskets so they don't all break at once.

The UK did that with coal, back in the 80's. The British Isles is basically just a coal seam sticking up out of the North Sea. You can pick coal up on the beaches, and scrape the earth away and there it is in opencast. Plus deep mining as well. In the 1980's the UK decided to close down its pits and buy coal, cheaper than producing our own, from the likes of Poland and even China (even shipping it 13,000 miles and it was still cheaper).
So we still have coal, we don't frack, so who knows what we may do with it in the future. It makes nice sculptures!
http://www.collieryroad.com/online/p...s/CR1267_L.jpg

All of the big cities in China have horendous air quality. And they are the biggest emerging car market. The last thing they need is another source of air pollution right in the cities adding to the problem. So it it is easy to see why they are motivated to ban ICE vehicles strictly on air quality. It doesn't have to be a devious investment scheme or world monopoly plan. Just an opportunity to skip one step in the automotive evolution since the vast majority there have yet to buy their first car. Similar to the way wireless communication has skipped hanging wires to landline phones in developing countries.

I don't think they care about the air quality, if anything they like it as it keeps people from getting old. Otherwise they would be making old people into Soylent Green or something.
I think developing countries skipped landlines because of cost, not because it's better or cleaner technology. If you don't already have the lines it just costs more to add them then cell towers. Cost will always be the driver in developing countries.

Not sure why you would think China doesn't care about the poor air quality in it's major cities. It seems to me that they have improved air quality high on their agenda. The cost of cell towers versus land lines in developing countries may cheaper or it may be because of the vast capability advantages of cell towers. But the fact is that for all reasons involved, they skipped an obsolete technology. So these countires are fortunate to have not wasted resources on them. The cost of dangerous air quality in health terms is driving China to try to skip the obsolete ICE car as it gets ready to sell 200 Million cars to it's emerging middle class.

There does seem to have been a change of attitude.

Hearing about all these countries proposing ban to ICE's makes me depressed. I wonder when the U.S. is going to announce such a plan. I just hope motorcycles are excluded.

That's pretty dark.

Banning new sales is less onerous than exclusion zones in inner cities. There is an almost bottomless pit of used vehicles in the USofA. You can still get pretty good deals on 1950s models.

Cell towers don't give you high speed internet or electricity. If they run polls or trenches they will run both power and phone, cable, or fiber as well. The cell towers are just cheap and easy. The people will want those "obsolete" technologies, and as soon as they can afford to pay enough to make it profitable, companies will put them in also. Ironically I must live somewhere lower than 3rd world as everyday I am without cell coverage on my mail route and I'm a "city carrier". Good thing with all the modern tracking done on our fleets nowadays, supervisors actually have to get off their butts if they want to know what I'm doing all day LOL!

I'm probably a bit pessimistic about China actually caring about their people but I am old enough to remember them mobilizing with deadly force 300,000 heavily armed and trained troops against their own unarmed citizens. I also understand how the largest and fastest aging population on the planet is going to be impossible to ignore. Last time they ran the army against college kids and workers, next time it will be some poor dude with alzheimer's stumbling around in front of a tank not even knowing he's leading a revolution.

Great Leap Forward, eh?

To quote Stephan Molyneux, "I'm trying to have hope and you're not helping."

Anyway, it was R. Buckminster Fuller that talked about 'ephemeralization' and 'tracked to trackless, wired to wireless'. And here we are today.

The Chinese have passenger train service. Chinese roads don't cover the continent. Cars are local or regional. Easier to squeeze out ICE.

Had we made the same decision about train service circa 1946, and disallowed urban sprawl, cars wouldn't mean much here.

I have long said nothing has done more for real freedom in the USA than our roads, highways, and private automobiles, affordable and accessible to everyone. You can say people vote with their feet but in reality they vote with their wheels.

Here in the UK, most long distance travel is by train. If you are travelling in a hurry or on business, plane, and if the whole family is travelling you take the car. Granted, our "long distance" would be considered "local" in the US and "just popping next door" in Australia!

I have heard our state, Montana, is about the same size as Germany. We are the 4th largest size wise of the 50. You can spend all day at 75-85mph trying to get from east the west of it 703 miles on the interstate. When you are done you have gone from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere. Ironically we do have a great railroad that also goes the whole way east to west following what we call the High Line (which is latitude not altitude) even more crossing the middle of nowhere. It's also great if you are going nowhere. The problem is when I go nowhere I want to be the only one there. Nothing like a crowd to ruin nowhere.

The only reason we use the railways here is to save money. By choice I would drive but the price of petrol makes a long journey prohibitive for me. Unless the whole family is going.

Honestly, I am thirty-eight years old and I am still entertained by the idea that I can get in my car and drive hundreds or thousands of miles, but sometimes I would rather take a train. I regularly wish we had better mass transit.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...-say/82613144/

Who talked about improving society through VR? :)

We are living in the golden age of fossil fuel wealth.
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https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net...c8&oe=5A416A98
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Honestly, I am old[er] and I am still entertained by the idea that I can get in my car and bang out quarter mile trap speeds, but sometimes I would rather walk through a show 'n shine. They'll never get me on a 2400mph train.

I am not sure that anyone would argue that going back to muscles and firewood would be good for us. Sure, the exercise would benefit many of us, although some would have an uphill battle, but this page says the average homeowner uses almost five cords of wood a year. How many trees it takes to make a cord entirely depends on the trees, but I read that, on average, one tree that is thirty-six feet tall might possibly make one cord.

I do not know why it specified homeowners, except that people in apartments very well might have central heating, and I read there were 125,000,000 heads of household in 2016. Does that suggest we would need to chop down 675 million trees each year just for heating?

That is not a small number!

That is a large number!

Obviously no one said 8 Billion people could go back to firewood. Hence the question mark. One thing for sure is the end of growth.

We lost over a million ACRES of trees to wildfires, just in the last 3 months, just in Montana. That would be at least 10 million cords if not ten times that in some of the old growth that burned. A waste but also a window at what that much smoke would do. It was bad, like off the charts bad, air quality. You couldn't see more than 2 miles for months, some days you couldn't see 2 blocks away. If you were burning that much in the winter it would be even worse with temperature inversions. Still your math is an overestimate as millions in the southern see a wouldn't "need" heat at all.

Energy is not just heat. It's everything. Watch Nate Hagens.
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https://youtu.be/YUSpsT6Oqrg
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What is this "need" you speak of.

How many people in the south use the heater despite you saying they do not need it? Have you told them they did not need it?

They do controlled burns throughout the year in the Show Low area. Dad used to have some contacts and always pushed to thin the trees, chip it, and sell the chips.

Make money and reduce forest fires?

Apparently they prefer starting forest fires instead.

I do not know much about the population outside of the U.S., but https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/u...h.html?mcubz=1

One idea is to move people from places that do not grow food to places that grow food. You can try saying "No kids for you!"

Let me know how that works out.

An acre is a statistic. How many people can visualize how large 1/640th of a square mile is?

Seems like the Chinese government is aiming toward ethanol, and likely to increase its local production by 2020. Since it's stockpiling corn in order to control the prices, turning that into ethanol sounds like a good option. I'd just be curious to figure out how they would use the distillation grain...

That would be a very foolish move going forward.

Not so foolish. Going all-electric is not so easy, and there are many agricultural residues and crop surpluses that can be repurposed into fuels. At least it's more effective as a measure to close the carbon cycle instead of just letting it rot away releasing methane which has a longer half-life than CO².

If it is done with byproduct and not food. Ok. But the bigger motivation is to get the smog out of the cities. The air there is notorious.

The distillation grain can still be used as a protein source. Anyway, considering the worldwide trend toward a reduction on the carbohydrates added to processed foods, it makes sense to turn some of these into ethanol. BTW there is at least one soybean processing plant in Brazil looking to use the soybean molasses that come as a byproduct of concentrate soy protein as a feedstock for ethanol, and it's also worth to remind that soybean is another staple of Chinese cuisine.

China's wealth comes from industrial production.

Healthy workers means better production.

Air quality is one of the big problems the government is tackling and taking seriously.

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Cabled internet and... errh... cable... is more reliable and quicker than wireless.

Landlines are not more expensive (on the consumer side). It's just that a smartphone is more useful as a communications device than a landline.

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A bit like: "Why would I still want to install a telegraph when I could have a telephone, instead."

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Back in the 80's, our only means of intertown communication was via CB radio. Landline telephony didn't reach our town then.

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I just had a phone installed. An actual, honest-to-goodness telephone. After living in this country for nearly thirty eight years.

One of the great barriers to information infrastructure (in this country, at least) is transport infrastructure. It's hard to string out a cable or erect a cell tower when there are no roads going where you want to set it up.

The most noticeable advantage that I have noticed when it comes to cellphones and wireless internet is that it seems less prone to weather damage and resumes operation quicker after any occurrence.