Britain Pledges to Ban New Diesel and Gas Cars by 2040

EDIT: I'm also hoping that by 2025, the 100kWh battery capacity will be standard in pretty much all $15,000+ EVs. The reason I'm hoping and I'm not so sure it will happen is because Tesla itself has signaled that it's not in a hurry to pass the 100kWh battery capacity mark even with the more expensive Model S for now.

My guess is it said that because it wants to put that extra money into buying more expensive self-driving equipment. Similarly, on the Model 3 it has already installed the self-driving hardware, even if the customer doesn't want to use it, so Tesla probably doesn't want to further expand those costs with larger capacity batteries for now.

I'm not a fan of this plan because for one, I think self-driving cars will be in "beta" for a lot longer than expected anyway, and two, it will unnecessarily slow down the EV revolution by compromising on battery capacity to include expensive self-driving equipment.

This wouldn't be a problem if it merely affected Tesla. Unfortunately, so far most of the other car makers have tended to "wait for permission" from Tesla before pushing the limits of their own EVs.

They kept "one-upping" (laughably so) each other for years with an extra 5 mile range from a bottom of 70 mile range on their EVs, until Tesla said Model 3 would have over 200 miles. Even now there are a bunch of cars planned for 2018 with only 30-40 kWh batteries and about 120 mile real world range.

I'm still optimistic for now, and I hope that now that most car maker have actually started taking EVs more seriously (we won't see the effects of that until 2021+ though), there will be a "megapixel-race" of sorts, but for battery capacity in the not too distant future. I want the EV makers to "go crazy" with 200kWh batteries, 300kWh, 400kWh, etc. Let the market decide what is the optimum battery size for passenger cars, for trucks, for semis, and so on.

Arguably, it was ahead of its time - as opposed to this announcement, which is almost tardy - but it's a sad truth that one of the "pragmatic concerns" is whether or not it'll annoy the sitting party's voting base.

And that's exactly why this is a dodge: It doesn't affect the current administration, and if a future administration doesn't like it, they can just change it. it's a classic maneuver of the "kick the can down the road while pretending to make policy" kind.

Any gas released into Earth's atmosphere would diffuse quite quickly.

The sun shines on the ground in a wide band of the spectrum and heats it up. The hot ground re-radiates mainly in the infrared. The result is equilibrium. CO2 reflects infrared more than the broad spectrum of solar radiation. Thus the ground with CO2 above it still gets heated as much by the sun but the infrared it radiates is partly now reflected back on itself. Thus the equilibrium is altered and the ground gets hotter.

So, even if the CO2 didn't spread everywhere, it would still be causing heating locally. The heat would eventually spread everywhere.