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HOW’S NORWAY DOING WITH EVS? PART 2
YESTERDAY, TWO FASCINATING ARTICLES yielded tidbits about Norway and its dramatic rise of electric vehicle sales from 1 percent in 2014 to 83 percent last year as consumers responded to government spiffs. Today, Jack Ewing continues in The New York Times with “In Norway, the Electric Vehicle Future Has Already Arrived” and David Zipper continues in Vox with “Why Norway—the Poster Child for Electric Cars—is Having Second Thoughts.
I usta think that EVs were unacceptable in Scandinavian countries because of cold weather/battery problems. It turns out, though, that the challenges are more sociology than climate.
Government Subsidies. As already noted, Jack Ewing cites, “Battery-powered vehicles were exempted from value-added and import taxes and from highway tolls. The government also subsidized the construction of fast charging stations, crucial in a country nearly as big as California with just 5.5 million people.” (By contrast, California’s population is 39 million.)
Ewing observes, “The policies put Norway more than a decade ahead of the United States. The Biden administration aims for 50 percent of new-vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, a milestone Norway passed in 2019.”
Not Without Tradeoffs. “But there is still a problem where the rubber meets the road,” Ewing notes. “Oslo’s air has unhealthy levels of microscopic particles generated partly by the abrasion of tires and asphalt. Electric vehicles, which account for about one-third of the registered vehicles in the city but a higher proportion of traffic, may even aggravate that problem.”
Ewing is reminded by an Oslo resident that EVs are a lot heavier than equivalently sized cars powered by internal combustion. Thus, their operation causes proportionally more road degradation.
What’s more, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure are typically funded by taxation of gasoline and diesel fuels. Whence this funding in an EV society?
Complexities of Urbanization. Ewing cites “Another persistent problem: Apartment residents say finding a place to plug in their cars remains a challenge. In the basement of an Oslo restaurant recently, local lawmakers and residents gathered to discuss the issue.”
Ewing continues, “Sirin Hellvin Stav, Oslo’s vice mayor for environment and transport, said at the event that the city wants to install more public chargers but also reduce the number of cars by a third to make streets safer and free space for walking and cycling.”
The Hypocrisy of Norway’s North Sea Economy. Ewing also cites, “Ms. Stav acknowledged what she called the hypocrisy of Norway’s drive to reduce greenhouse gases while producing lots of oil and gas. Fossil-fuel exports generated revenue of $180 billion last year. ‘We’re exporting that pollution,’ Ms. Stav said, noting that her party has called for oil and gas production to be phased out by 2035.”
What About Public Transportation? “All city buses will be electric by the end of the year,” Ewing notes. But how to encourage people onto public transportation when personal EVs get spiffs of toll-free use, free parking, and free ferries as well?
And an Egalitarian Society? In his Vox article, David Zipper writes, “I discovered a Norwegian EV bonanza that has indeed reduced emissions—but at the expense of compromising vital societal goals. Eye-popping EV subsidies have flowed largely to the affluent, contributing to the gap between rich and poor in a country proud of its egalitarian social policies.”
Zipper observes, “Many low-income Norwegians do not own a car: In Bergen, for instance, 67 percent of households in the lowest income quartile go without one.”
He cites a recent study suggesting that “electrification subsidies—which ballooned to $4 billion in 2022, equivalent to 2 percent of the national budget—have redistributed resources toward the rich.”
Automobile Dependence. “Worse,” Zipper says, “the EV boom has hobbled Norwegian cities’ efforts to untether themselves from the automobile and enable residents to instead travel by transit or bicycle, decisions that do more to reduce emissions, enhance road safety, and enliven urban life than swapping a gas-powered car for an electric one.”
By contrast, recall the superblock concept evolving elsewhere in Europe.
Switching the Spiffs. “Despite the hosannas from abroad,” Zipper says, “Norway’s government has begun to unwind some of its electrification subsidies in order to mitigate the downsides of no-holds-barred EV promotion.”
“Over the last decade,” Zipper writes, “Oslo has joined Bergen, Trondheim, and Stavanger (Norway’s four largest cities) in committing to meet all future trip growth through transit, biking, and walking—not cars. Seeking to reduce driving, Oslo has removed over 4,000 parking spots since 2016 while also building bike lanes, widening sidewalks, and adjusting traffic patterns to reduce through traffic. Those efforts helped the city achieve a remarkable milestone in 2019: For a full year, not a single pedestrian or cyclist was killed in a crash.”
A street in Oslo city center. Image by David Zipper for Vox.
Zipper quotes Tiina Ruohonen, the Oslo mayoral advisor: “The mistake is to think the EVs solve all your problems when it comes to transport. They don’t.” ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024
Simanaitis Says 
Good to write about both the plusses and the minuses as you’ve done here! I like the balance because it’s not forced…Keep it up!
It’s interesting, though, that Norway seems to be taking the use-everything approach rather than the one-winner, silver-bullet approach demanded in the US. Electric transit *and* unpowered movement *and* personal cars (electrified where possible) where appropriate (personal cars, especially the largish ones that EVs tend to be, are not appropriate in the centers of European cities for many types of trips). Yes, adjusting some of the incentives from time to time has to be part of that. The US is a different society that does not value egalitarian principles, and its cities are mostly designed around use of cars in ways that are difficult to change. Doesn’t mean EVs are useless, but they aren’t going to take over all trips overnight for all drivers, so by common definition they’re useless in the US; they’re mainly another arrow in the quiver for Norway.
EVs remain a Band Aid for the patient hemorrhaging in the ER.
There are not enough raw materials for the world to swap all ICE (internal combustion) cars for EVs. EVs run on petroleum tires (producing most the dust in urban areas), and use six (6) times as many minerals as i.c. cars, including cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper, manganese, graphite, zinc, rare earths like neodymium, thallium, and dysprosium, the latters’ extraction requiring huge amounts of carcinogens like ammonia, hydrochloric acid, sulfates. Much of these minerals are imported from politically unstable regions. Thallium has been a common ingredient in rat poison. It’s tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless. While those who tested positive hadn’t consumed poisonous levels of the metal, it was enough to cause fatigue, heart arrhythmia, nausea, digestive trouble, neurological problems, and hair loss. The scariest part is that even after patients completed detoxification regiments, thallium continued to show up in their systems.
“We now know that heavy metals are additive and synergistic,” says David Quid, the lead scientist at Doctors Data, PhD in nutritional biochemistry. “If you get a little thallium, and a little lead, and a little cadmium in your system, you’ve got one plus one plus one equals five or six, not just three.” In other words, these metals do more damage when they’re combined.”This stuff bioaccumulates,” he added. “Down the road, it’s going to kick you in the ass one way or another.”
Just another reason the world’s scientists agree, every poll, that overpopulation remains our by far biggest problem, their words, “bigger than climate.” According to UN and other studies, animals raised for meat and dairy produce more greenhouse gas than all the world’s cars, trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships combined.
Meanwhile, every study not overtly or covertly funded by meat, dairy, egg industry comes to the same conclusion: The single best way to stave heart disease, inflammation, hypertension, cardiovascular ills, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, macular degeneration, dementia (now called type 3 diabetes), Alzheimer’s is a plant based, vegan repast. Hasn’t slowed the world’s leading Formula One driver, Lewis Hamilton.