The German Spiegel Online Magazine is reporting that oil-producing Norway will be banning the sale of new Gasoline and Diesel automobiles from 2025. They already have the highest rate of vehicle electrification in the world, with near 25% of all new vehicles being sold being electric, and their electricity grid is near 100% driven by inexpensive renewable energy, so it should be easily doable for them and would lead to a major reduction in Norway’s CO2 emissions. Despite Norway being a fairly small, albeit wealthy, market, this will create another incentive for automakers to accelerate electric vehicle development and sales, since they will be locked out of the market completely if they don’t have viable electric vehicles on offer.
Spiegel Online is also reporting that The Netherlands is considering a similar law. Now that Norway has made the first step, one can easily imagine other countries whose grid is fed by large amounts of renewable energy, like Denmark and Uruguay, taking similar steps in the near future. In essence what we are witnessing is the beginning of the end of the use of the internal combustion engine for personal transportation vehicles and urban vehicles.
The Gulf Oil Sheikhs, the Russian Oil and Gas Barons, and international Big Oil owners and executives, such as the Koch brothers, are going to hate this, but our planet will love it and, quite frankly, this can’t come soon enough.
Luckily, we have had a president for the last 8 years who has had the vision and smarts to realize that vehicle electrification would be the wave of the future, so the U.S. now actually has automakers who are ahead of the game in vehicle electrification. We should also be thankful to have Elon Musk, who has probably done more for vehicle electrification with Tesla Motors than anyone else on the planet.