Britain is banning all new gas and diesel car sales after 2040


The United Kingdom will ban all sales of new gas- and diesel-powered vehicles beginning in 2040, the British environment secretary, Michael Gove, announced Wednesday. "We can't carry on with diesel and petrol cars," Gove said in a BBC interview. "There is no alternative to embracing new technology."
While demand for low-emission electric and hybrid vehicles is rapidly rising in Britain, they accounted for less than 3 percent of new car sales in the country in 2015. Still, the "timescale involved here is sufficiently long-term to be taken seriously," said David Bailey, an automotive industry expert at the U.K.'s Aston University. Gove's plan includes nearly $2 billion in government spending to incentivize the change.
Germany's Bundesrat in October approved a similar but non-binding ban on production of all new internal combustion engines by 2030; earlier this month, France implemented a binding measure that bans all new gas and diesel car sales. Like the U.K. rule, it takes effect in 2040.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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