UK rejects EU call for city centre ban on petrol cars

[jumpy]

Originally Posted by Feuer Frei!

2050? Realistic?
And why not?
Just because the Poms don't want to, so what?

Try building the infrastructure required to support business and peoples homes and access to city centres over here and see how far you get - quite apart from the total lack of any money to complete such projects, the whole way the city economy works currently is just not compatible with pie in the sky ideals such as this.

Plus there's the 'way things are done' ...I'd quite like to work from home; I have all the facilities to manage working from home as a draughtsman, but this will never happen. Reason being, most companies, and bosses for that matter, just wouldn't do it, never mind the saving they'd make on office rental space and a myriad other costs associated with having employees travelling to and working from a central building somewhere, they just wouldn't go for it.

Environmental issues and their solutions for the conurbation are much more socially complex than an arbitrary benchmark for reducing emissions, issued by a bunch of overpaid eurocrats.
Better off talking to china first. No matter what everyone else does in regards to reducing carbon emissions, it'll be a complete waste of time on a golabal scale (and that's really the only scale that matters here) if the chinese and other rapidly developing industrial nations follow the path we made, before things like global warming were even heard of. This, of course, brings the inevitable 'well you built all of your industry and manufacturing the cheap and dirty way, so why should we have to do it any differently, and importantly, more costly than you?' I'm sure some countries would view such strictures as a means of keeping them down on the world stage and not as a means to reduce whatever climate change is happening.