UK TO BAN PETROL, DIESEL, HYBRID CARS FROM 2035

BRITAIN will ban the sale of new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars from 2035, five years earlier than planned, in an attempt to reduce air pollution that could herald the end of more than a century of reliance on the internal combustion engine. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is seeking to use the announcement to elevate the UK’s environmental credentials after he sacked the head of a Glasgow UN Climate Change Conference planned for November known as COP26. “We have to deal with our CO2 emissions, and that is why the UK is calling for us to get to net zero as soon as possible, to get every country to announce credible targets to get there,” Johnson said yesterday. The two-week COP26 summit is seen as a moment of truth for the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat global warming with responsibility for persuading big polluting countries to agree more ambitious emissions cuts falling on the British hosts. Britain’s step amounts to a victory for electric cars that if copied globally could hit the wealth of oil producers, as well as transform the car industry and one of the icons of 20th Century capitalism: the automobile itself. The mayors of Paris, Madrid, Mexico City and Athens have said they plan to ban diesel vehicles from city centres by 2025. France is preparing to ban the sale of fossil fuel-powered cars by 2040 and Norway’s parliament has set a nonbinding goal that by 2025 all cars should be zero emissions. I Reuters