Remember how many senior managers from automakers went to jail for the rigging of diesel car emissions during regulatory tests and which is estimated to have caused and still cause tens of thousands of additionl deaths in Europe due to the additional polution?

That would be that magical number that when multiplied by any other number yields itself as result: zero.

If per the actual actions of these politicians (not their words, talk is cheap and their words are often unrelated to their actions) even the lifes of europeans are less important than the continued prosperity of those “oh so important” top managers in the auto industry, you can hardly expect they would treat Climate as anywhere as important as the profitability of the auto industry.

I think it’s less about industry lobbying and more an unwillingness for these governments to actually do what needs to be done to reduce the roadblocks needed for an outright ban on new ICE vehicles.

There doesn’t seem to be much of push to get infrastructure like charging stations in place and it seems they thought it was a ‘reverse Field of Dreams’ where “if you come, they will build it.” Charging stations and grid upgrades aren’t going to appear out of the ether simply because some politicians want to ban ICE vehicles. I don’t know the situation in the EU, but here in the US, most of our charging stations are built by Tesla or VW (under the Electrify America name as a punishment for dieselgate). Tesla charging stations aren’t abundant everywhere and VW seems more than happy to let their charging stations become dilapidated and antiquated as they’re not building them willingly to begin with. There are many parts of the country where your only option to charge is a 120/240V outlet, which output as little as 3-4 miles per hour of charge. This isn’t the way forward and it’ll likely take government incentives to make it happen.

Nothing to see here, just the EU doing what its constituency told them to do.