Norway is serious about its environmental plans, as it demonstrated in the latest measure they announced: banning all petrol cars by 2025.
The Scandinavian country continues to be one of the most progressive and greenest countries after politicians from all sides of the spectrum have reached a consensus and want 100 per cent of Norwegian cars running on green energy in the next decade.
According to the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv, “FRP will remove all gasoline cars”, a headline which makes reference to the populist right-wing Framstegspartiet, or Progress Party. The four parties in the country’s parliament have also agreed on a new electricity tax.
Reactions from the public have been overwhelmingly positive, and as expected, Elon Musk (founder and CEO of Tesla Motors) praised the move:
“Just heard that Norway will ban new sales of fuel cars in 2025,” he wrote on Twitter. “What an amazingly awesome country. You guys rock!!”.
About 24 percent of the country’s cars already run on electricity, and most of the country’s energy is already renewable (over 90% comes from hydro sources). Norway also plans to triple its wind energy with a $3 bln investment.
If the electricity source is clean, electric cars are much more environmentally friendly than conventional cars. Even when the power is generated using fossil fuels, electric vehicles usually fare better than gasoline vehicles, with significant reductions in overall global carbon emissions, due to the highly carbon-intensive processes associated with gasoline.
Europe’s developed countries seem to be splitting in two main directions, with countries like Norway, the Netherlands and Germany leading the way in renewables, while the UK is renewing its interest in technologies like hydraulic fracking. This is ironic, especially as a 2008 study conducted in the UK found that electric vehicles have the potential to cut down carbon dioxide and overall greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% – taking into account every step from the production to the disposal of the electric cars.
