Charge petrol users the true costs of their transport choices and there will be no choice but to buy an electric car (or no car at all - especially in cities)
Petrol/diesel users still massively outnumber EV users, and [at least in most places] everyone has a vote. Many less well-off voters are way more concerned about their family's immediate needs than they are about the long term future of the planet.
Politicians may be wondering if that's really a wise fight to start? At least, not right now.
The proper environmental solution would be going "fuck it, let's do it anyway", yet unfortunately, there is a whole planet outside of Sweden/Norway/Denmark, and they'd be more than happy to burn all of the fuel to pick up the economic opportunities that opened up.
Politics is hard.
The thing with fighting climate change is that it isn't actually an emergency. We're way past that. It is also not a disaster like a flood that would cause damage so abruptly that only preventive measures make sense.
For a human timescale, climate change has been slow to set in and will be slow to slow down. The upswing of that is that we truly have time to adapt. Other species don't, unless we specifically protect them. It's a disaster in slow motion, and like everything else happening in slow motion, we'll outscale it by a large factor.
With human development, our ability to minimize damage from natural disasters vastly outpaces any (experimentally uncertain so far, but should happen according to predictions) growth in the amount and severity of disasters such as hurricanes and droughts.
Well that was a wild tangent. Anyway, main point is, unless all BRICS countries are involved in anti-emissions measures so drastic they will never agree to them, there's nothing that can be done to meaningfully prevent temperatures to climb at least 2C by the end of the century. Sorry, there's geoengineering too but we should also avoid that if possible.
I think the number of countries ready to limit their increase of living standards if not already high are only those that are truly impacted. For everyone else they will try to find some other way around issues. And probably anyway end up better of than they are now.
Separating out the road use taxes like that will have to be done eventually. Is this a "rip off the band aid" approach?
Across Europe, "fuel taxes vary greatly [...] [taxes account] for 65-80% of unleaded petrol price and 60-80% of diesel prices"[0]
All those [EDIT: hundreds of] billions raised from the sale of petrol and diesel is going to have to be found somewhere else instead.
Taxing electricity more, or taxing charging - or driving - somehow, or by taxing the sale of EVs themselves?
[0] https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/ENVISSUENo12/page024....
But that would be far easier and cheaper than implementing some GPS tracking system in 31 million vehicles, where's the 9-figure contracts that can be given to the mate of a minister?
However road users like socialism when it's stuff they want to be subsidized.
Taxing sales directly doesn't make sense - sure recoup the externalities of lithium mining when the manufacturers buy the lithium, but to charge a consumption tax unrelated to damage done doesn't seem much sense to me.