The War On Cars

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Doug Brodie

As you know, I have been warning about this for years:

In a fit of self-loathing, the European Union has begun to destroy the economic engine that pays its bills. Some of this is well known, but some is not, and it will astonish you.

Only nine of the EU’s 27 member states are net budget contributors, and Germany pays the most – around €25bn (£22bn) in 2021. Without the generosity of the Bundesrepublik, the European Commission would struggle to keep the lights on at the Berlaymont.

In turn, that wealth comes from its manufacturing industry. Specifically, from strong global demand for the German vehicles which account for almost three-fifths of Europe’s car exports. As recently as a decade ago, the streets of Shanghai and Shenzhen teemed with German brand SUVs. 

So you would think that the regulators in Brussels would show some care to the delicate vase they’re carrying across the room. But not a bit of it.

French, German and Italian automakers are now caught in a pincer. In order to meet climate targets, vehicles powered by conventionally-refined hydrocarbons will be phased out, while much cheaper battery-powered (BEV) competition from China floods in.

The industry won’t be permitted to sell the product that European customers do want, but can’t compete on price with a product it appears to have enough of. So far, so (depressingly) obvious.

But what is little known is how specific and vindictive the EU has become in its attack on the car.

For this is not actually a war on the combustion engine, so much as a war on personal mobility. The EU has relaxed its dogmatic insistence on alternative hydrocarbons for maritime and aviation – but not for road vehicles.

To understand this, recall that the phrase “fossil fuel” is actually very misleading. Hydrocarbons are not only dug up and refined – they can also be made from scratch, using biology or chemistry.

The most “organic” method is to use algae. But you need a lot of it, and attempts to engineer them to produce higher yields have failed to scale.

Then there’s chemistry. The Fischer-Tropsch process converts carbon monoxide and hydrogen into a complex hydrocarbon – an e-fuel that can replace petrol.

You do need energy both to unlock the hydrogen, and then to create sufficient temperatures for the process itself to work. However, if these inputs are “zero carbon” then so is the e-fuel that emerges.

In December, I reported how Porsche is using wind power in Patagonia to produce petrol and diesel. Or, if we had lots of nuclear capacity, we’d use the off-peak electricity. By day the plants would keep us warm and at night they could create the petrol, diesel and oil we need.

In fact, Japan’s HTTR reactor design even produces the required hydrogen as a by-product.

In short, in fields where hydrocarbons are superior or simply irreplaceable, we can swap the ones we dig up with ones we make and still hit climate targets. And the infrastructure of pipelines and filling stations is already in place, which cannot be said for hydrogen or electric charging.

Industry is responding. Infinium, which is backed by both Amazon and Bill Gates, recently broke ground on a new plant that uses both carbon capture and renewables to create hydrogen. There are many more. But the EU is stubbornly refusing to allow cars and trucks to use them.

It’s baffling, because the Eurocrats at ‘DG-MOVE’ (the Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport) have already conceded that synthetic hydrocarbons are green.

In July, the EU permitted the maritime sector to use “renewable fuels of non biological origin (RFNBO)”, as it calls e-fuels. In October, it allowed the aviation sector to use them too.

Perhaps it’s ignorance, or simply dogma. However opposition to the car has become one of the sustaining grievances of modern policy making.

Just look at how vehemently our councils, our planners and our architects detest four wheel freedom, too. A low-intensity civil war is breaking out over low traffic neighbourhoods, or zoning schemes as in Oxford.

Nicholas Boyes Smith, the design czar for whom the “Office of Place” was created, issues a stream of anti-car Tweets.

Fifteen minute cities are “a  timeless Scrutonian ideal” he argues. There is no garden city or new town movement today. In the 1960s, bureaucrats bulldozed neighbourhoods to ensure that cars were convenient. Now they destroy neighbourhoods by inhibiting their use – or stop them being built at all.

“Planning is now about the rationing of materials and resources and space, rather than their deployment. It’s subtractive, not additive,” says architect critic Tim Abrahams.

“Constraint is the watchword, not opportunity.”

The Malthusians want fewer of us, and ideally we’d be going nowhere, except by bike or on foot. Car companies are facing prejudices from all corners, but it’s the EU’s ban on green fuel that is the most urgent.

No wonder Renault chief executive Luca de Meo, in an open letter to the EU published last month, bemoaned the lack of joined up thinking or strategy.

In contrast to the US and China, the Commission passes rule after rule, an incoherent mess. EU rules alone have made passenger cars 60pc heavier on average, he wrote.

Switzerland, which is in the European Economic Area but not the EU, has blessed e-fuels.

Like the Swiss, we also have an outstanding chemicals industry. The lunacy of aligning ourselves with Brussels, now we have left, has never been more apparent.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/22/eu-war-on-cars-destroying-economic-foundations