On Sat, 11 May 2019 11:43:06 +0100
John Williamson wrote:
On 11/05/2019 10:26, Graeme Wall wrote:
On 11/05/2019 09:57, JNugent wrote:

The obvious disaster is the losses incurred by those who followed
government advice and incentives by buying diesel cars rather than
petrol and are now being penalised for it?

It must be that.
That is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is by wanting a quick
political fix for CO2 emissions they ignored the fact that diesels are
responsible for much greater general pollution even if the manufacturers
hadn't been cheating on the tests.

At the time when the government were pushing for diesel cars, all the
green lobby were bemoaning how much more CO2 petrol cars emitted than
diesel, so all petrol cars must be replaced immediately by diesel ones.
When it was pointed out that petrol ones were cleaner in other ways than
diesel, they effectively just put their fingers in their ears "La, la,
la. I can't hear you. Got to reduce CO2 to save the planet"

CO2 is the important pollutant, all the others are irrelevent. If all traffic
stopped now the particulates and NOx would be gone in a day. The CO2 will still
be around for thousands of years to come.

Slightly related to this, I run a G-Wiz, and have worked out that using

Why? Apart from having no crash protection they're small, slow and have a very
limited range. They're 1980s engineering.

the normal mix of generation in the UK, my CO2 emissions are equivalent
to a petrol car doing 40 MPG.

That seems a bit pessimistic to me, especialy given UK generation has run
without coal now for a week.