Sweden hikes taxes on polluting vehicles, removes taxes on low-emission vehicles, plans to remove all fossil fuel burning cars by 2030

Honda Civic är en bilmodell från Honda. Nuvarande modell (2006) finns tillgänglig med 1,4 liters motor, 1,8 liters motor samt en 1.3liters hybrid (bensin/el). Hybridmodellen har den amerikanska karossen som är en 4-dörrars sedan. 3-dörrars och 5-dörrars modellen har den europeiska karossen som fick väldigt mycket uppmärksamhet i media eftersom den har ganska ovanlig design som togs direkt från conceptbilen. Att ta designen direkt från en conceptbil utan några större förändringar är ganska ovanligt inom bilvärlden.

Interesting article here on a recent step by the Swedish government to eventually remove all fossil fuel burning cars by 2030:

Levies on carbon-dioxide exhaust will rise 33 percent for the highest-emissions automobiles, and diesel fuel taxes will climb 0.4 krona a liter ($0.17 a U.S. gallon), the government said today in a statement. Buyers of new “green” cars including electric will be excluded from taxes altogether for the first five years.

Sweden aims to replace fossil fuel-burning cars by 2030 and with Germany is pursuing more ambitious air-pollution targets than most European nations. Both propose reducing heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming by 40 percent in the three decades through 2020, twice the cut planned by the European Union.

“The global recession can’t be used as an excuse to stop acting to solve our big future challenges,” the government said in the statement. “The work for an international response to the climate questions must continue to be high up on our and the world’s agendas.”

Indeed, a recession is the perfect time to start enacting long-term policies like these, since the less beholden a country is to events outside their borders (energy prices for example) the stronger the foundation they have for being able to withstand these shocks next time around.

Policies like this also don't necessarily need to have anything to do with liberalism vs. conservatism either, as they might be framed in North America. I know a person from another forum I post on that is 100% pro-Iraq War, wants the US to put Iran on a very short leash and bomb them if they don't comply - in short, your average neo-Conservative position popular around 2002. What's interesting though is that he's also strongly in favour of a huge gasoline tax hike (something to the tune of an extra $2 a gallon if I remember correctly) from which he wants the US to develop new technologies to keep it independent of Middle East oil from now on. He's also a big animal rights activist, so overall a pretty interesting personality to debate online.

Back to Sweden: Sweden is probably one of the few non-island countries that should be able to succeed with something like this. The problem with a lot of other countries is that even if they enact some pretty stringent fuel standards or want to create a new fuel grid for hydrogen or other vehicles, cars from other countries are still going to be driving in all the time and these need to be accommodated as well. Luckily though Sweden has some pretty environmentally progressive nations on its border (Norway, Denmark, Finland) so cooperation on this is a pretty easy task.