Hybrids were mostly a tax scam in my opinion. In Germany until recently you could get a 6,000-8,000 € subsidy on these cars and when leasing them through a company you got a really nice tax reduction from 1% of the list price to 0,25 %, which amounts to several thousand Euros per year as well. Not to forget the vehicle tax was drastically reduced as well. Overall mostly very affluent people bought these cars, and the net effect for the environment was probably negative. It’s just a stupid idea to put a tiny battery into a 500 HP car and pretend it’s helping the environment when it just contributes to putting more cars on the road.
This is the same Germany who recently “halved” their plastic waste numbers by attaching milk bottle caps to the actual bottles so they’re counted as a single piece of waste instead of two…
> This is the same Germany who recently “halved” their plastic waste numbers by attaching milk bottle caps to the actual bottles so they’re counted as a single piece of waste instead of two…
Do you have any sources discussing this? Most waste numbers I've seen from France (where I live) and the EU are in volume or weight, neither of which will be affected by the caps remaining attached to bottles (which is an EU-wide thing IIRC).
That is simply a lie. And these are probably accounts for opinion making. It is an EU-wide regulation from 2019, which is now being implemented by all EU states [0]. In addition, the way in which plastic waste is counted is also prescribed throughout the EU [1].
As far as I can see this is only for "single-use plastic beverage bottles" and not milk cartons. I have seen the attached caps on Cola bottles for example, but neither glass bottles or milk cartons.
If you look on the actual data, it's the other way around. Is this just Russian opinion making?
1. The Greens didn't push to close the nuclear power plants alone:
The phase-out of nuclear energy in Germany was first regulated in the year 2000 under the red-green federal government (Schröder I Cabinet) through a contract known as the Nuclear Consensus between the Federal Republic and various operating companies. In 2002, the German Nuclear Energy Act was revised based on this contract. The Nuclear Consensus stipulated that, assuming a standard operational lifetime of about 32 years, a nuclear power plant was allowed to produce a specified "remaining electricity amount" before being decommissioned. Based on the electricity production of the individual plants in the past, the assigned remaining electricity amounts would mean that the last of the 19 German nuclear power plants would be decommissioned around 2021. Because the Nuclear Consensus allowed for the transfer of remaining electricity amounts between plants, the Stade (on November 14, 2003) and Obrigheim (on May 11, 2005) nuclear power plants were decommissioned.
On October 28, 2010, the Bundestag, with a black-yellow majority under the Merkel II Cabinet, decided on a further amendment to the Nuclear Energy Act, extending the operating times of the seven facilities that started operation before 1980 by eight years each, and those of the remaining ten nuclear power plants by 14 years each. This was publicly referred to as a "reversal of the phase-out." In return, the energy companies committed to an annual payment of 300 million euros for the years 2011 and 2012, and 200 million euros annually until 2016. The funds were intended to finance the Energy and Climate Fund. Furthermore, the federal government (as announced on September 6) introduced a nuclear fuel tax of 2.3 billion euros annually for six years, from January 1, 2011, to December 31, 2016.
This extension was revised in 2011 – following the onset of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This was publicly referred to as a "reversal of the reversal of the phase-out." After the announcement of a moratorium on operating times on March 14, 2011, the operators ceased their payments to the Energy and Climate Fund.
During the energy crisis following the energy conflict in 2022, the federal government allowed the continued operation of the last three nuclear power plants, Emsland, Isar 2, and Neckarwestheim 2, until mid-April 2023; this required a legislative change, as the Nuclear Energy Act of 2011 had definitively planned for a gradual phase-out by the end of 2022. In April 2023, the nuclear power plants Emsland, Isar 2, and Neckarwestheim 2 were taken offline.
>> The same Germany where the "Green party" pushed to close nuclear power plants and buy more gas from the Russians. Truly clown world.
> If you look on the actual data, it's the other way around. Is this just Russian opinion making?
>The Greens didn't push to close the nuclear power plants alone: [...]
Am I misreading your post? It looks like you're not really disagreeing with the claim that '"Green party" pushed to close nuclear power plants', just quibbling over some details like whether other parties were involved.
What's important for this dialog is time.
The Schröder 1 and the Merkel decision are decades old. Would it have been better to keep a health nuclear industry going? Yes, probably. But that was killed for good with 2011 reversal (Merkel, not Greens...). And even that would have been of questionable value because there would have been no new construction.
The red-green-yellow government in 2022 had a few remaining nuclears going but keeping them online would have been difficult and costly. So there was no real choice.
The real energy politics failure happened mostly under Merkel , but the greens are sooooo bad. Yes, ofc - it boiled over in 2021/2022 but we warned Merkel did not bother to set the necessary goals in the decades prior.
Kinda difficult to built new solar and wind energy quickly when your predecessor intentionally crippled that.
>Is this just Russian opinion making?
uhh my comment is objectively anti russian and accuses the greens of playing into their hands.
And I don't see how your comment refutes what I said. If anything it makes the case that not just the greens are anti nuclear but Germans in general have lost the plot and gone anti nuclear. Probably not the point you wanted to make, but there it is.
It was exactly the point I wanted to make. And you proofed it. Let me cite myself:
„1. The Greens didn't push to close the nuclear power plants alone:“
But: You think
„The same Germany where the "Green party" pushed to close nuclear power plants and buy more gas from the Russians. Truly clown world.“
is good style and promotes factual, also political, discussion? I believe that it is not and thus promotes the division and the intensification of the discourse instead of factual discussion. And Russia and the AfD are happy about that.
Russia would very much like to sell a lot of gas to all of us. Russia would very much like to continue to act as one of the main suppliers and main players in nuclear energy, which is why Russia also has something against renewable energies. But the division of Europe is more valuable.
I disagree, calling out Russian influence does not do them a favor. It clears the air. I called out the Greens specifically because they have the gall to call themselves the Green party when they support the opposite. And to probably misquote Linus, "Just because I say I like hotdogs doesn't mean I hate hamburgers." I didn't comment on the rest of German politics, nor should I have to in order to avoid accusations of "doing Russia's work". But yes, a great deal of German politics has been compromised for awhile now. The AFD is self explanatory but the SPD and CDU has their fair share of problems too. Schroder and Merkel both had pro Russian policies.
It absolutely helps. Even a small battery enable regenerative braking. Instead of simply losing all of your braking to heat, you capture some and use it on the next acceleration.
I have a hybrid truck. In city driving, it is twice as efficient as its non-hybrid counterpart. It’s also about 50% more efficient than our mid-sized SUV. It also has the benefit of being able to turn off the engine for an extended period of idling.
Unfortunately, it depends on where you are living. While cars in urban areas are a definite luxury, not having a car is the luxury outside of cities.
No amount of incentives and enhancements of public transportation will ever fix this issue for sparsely populated areas. You can try to reduce exhausts and travel distances with car, but you can't fight car ownership.
My parents live in such an area and they can commute to work and back fully electric. They charge overnight and always fall back to combustion for larger routes, such as the next airport.
If you ignore the needs of those people, you only strengthen political forces who also support big oil. There needs to be a middle ground.
Living in a sparsely populated area is the luxury here. You can live somewhere rural, somewhere small, but still within biking distance of everything you need daily and within train or bus of weekly needs.
I'm afraid missing the nuances of people's livelihood is exactly the point I tried to make:
> If you ignore the needs of those people, you only strengthen political forces who also support big oil. There needs to be a middle ground.
How are you even transporting your weekly groceries without a car? What if you have family? And do you also use your bike during heavy rain/winter/strong heat? It just doesn't work in practice.
Virtually nobody moves to rural areas. People have been living there for generations. You can't expect them to mass-migrate somewhere else you must address their needs. If people have the impression that nobody supports them, you get extremists.
> How are you even transporting your weekly groceries without a car?
My bicycle rear rack is rated for 25KG and I have 2 70L bags, my Wald front basket can handle some additionnal load and I converted my old kids trailer to carry groceries too. I can carry enough.
But you don't have to buy a week worth of groceries in a single day.
Also we are in 2024. Supermarkets do deliveries.
> What if you have family?
There are seats for toddlers and cargo bikes and trailers for those that need to carry more than one. After that kids love cycling. We are constantly saying humans have a way too sedentary life and people need to exercise in order to be healthy. You have here a solution much cheaper both in term of time and money than going to the gym.
> And do you also use your bike during heavy rain/winter/strong heat?
You just deal with it the same way you do when you have to walk from your car in that huge parking lot to the place you are actually going to.
The only limiter is climbs. But if I was limited by my climbing capacity while loaded I would use an e-bike.
I don't get these kinds of arguments. Even if rural areas still use cars, reducing pollution in urban areas (the ones, you know, most populated) still brings massive improvements to everyone (if nothing else, the ruralites aren't stuck in traffic as much when they inevitably commute into cities) and has very measureable health benefits for everyone in the cities.
Where does this silly idea that "let's use more public transport in cities" requires rural areas to not use cars come from?
"Urban" in the US doesn't mean a dense city where mass transit makes sense. Loads of areas in the US are "urban" but due to design are practically entirely car dependent. Houses are in seas of single family homes with large lots. Stores are islands separated by massive parking lots. Bolting on a bus service to those designs means driving tons of empty busses (lots of different routes because things are everywhere) and long walks (everything is an island) to connect to things.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do mass transit. I like it, I want to see more of it. But thinking it's just a matter of buying more busses isn't reality for a lot of the US. We pretty much need to redesign our cities and towns for transit to be successful. Rug-pulling people by building out transit-unfriendly cities and then banning cars isn't going to go over well.
To be posts like yours sound like you actually are saying you shouldn't do mass transit - they're always full of excuses and reasons to delay, avoid and not move on it. You seem to reduce someone saying "let's do mass transit" to "let's buy more busses" and then argue against it.
No, I agree, we should do mass transit. I want more of it. I use what's already there when it makes sense. I'd love to massively reduce my VMT.
But take for example my neighborbood. There's bus lines on the north edge going east-west, bus lines on the west edge going north-south. I'm lucky, I live at the west edge of my neighborhood near one of the entrances so the north line stop is just outside my door. The south bound stop is across six lanes of 40+mph traffic with the nearest crosswalk over a quarter mile. It's a half-mile walk from my house to the east-west stop on the north edge of my neighborhood. And I'm in the middle-west edge of my neighborhood, if you're in the south-east of the neighborhood you've got about a mile walk to get to a bus stop. And my neighborhood isn't even a very big one for DFW.
It doesn't make sense to snake the busses all throughout the neighborhoods, you'll spend all the bus travel time going up and down residential streets. Nobody wants to ride on a bus slowly crawling through the maze of residences.
And even then, once I get on the bus half the travel time is just going past one development of houses after another. And I'm in a generally denser and more mixed part of the city than a lot of these places. Lots of my friends live in neighborhoods where it's at least a 5-10min drive to leave their neighborhood. Then they pass by a few neighborhoods before they get to the first small smatterings of retail, but chances are it doesn't have the stop they're interested in.
Transit really just can't function with this design. We need to redesign this to make it work. Cut up these massive residential only blocks, mix in some retail, densify things, etc. I'm not saying this to suggest we can't do it, I'm just being realistic to the challenges at hand. Burying your head in the sand acting like it's just a matter of another train line or more bus service or adding bike lanes isn't going to solve the systemic design issues we have in a lot of US cities and towns.
by talking to politician from Urban areas. (This is just my real life experience). I live in an urban area, also talk to people from car friendly places and they complain about lack of parking areas which is no surprise in a city (and stupid to build more)
Politicians from Urban areas otherwise hate cars and want to forbid everywhere including rural areas. I just wonder why people cant understand that different places need different stuff.
>you got a really nice tax reduction from 1% of the list price to 0,25 %, which amounts to several thousand Euros per year as well
how does a 0.75 percentage point savings amount to "several thousand Euros per year"?
>Overall mostly very affluent people bought these cars,
Tesla buyers tend to be affluent as well. Should we cancel EV tax credits for them as well?
>and the net effect for the environment was probably negative
I don't get it. According to the EPA at least hybrids have much better fuel efficiency than their conventional counterparts. Therefore I don't understand how the hybrids would be a net negative.
When you get a company car your personal taxable income increases by 1% of the car's list price per month. Tax law assumes a 1% personal use of the car. You can avoid this tax by keeping a log book of all car rides indicating personal or business use. 1% of a $60,000 car is $7,200 per year. At a tax rate of 42% it's "several thousand Euros per year"
For EVs this tax was reduced to 0.25% to further incentivise the adoption.
