4x4's to pay £1800pa road tax...

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Minotaur

Native
Apr 27, 2005
1,600
232
Birmingham
twisted firestarter said:
This is a real renewable solution waiting to be tapped into but I suspect it will not happen until the powers that be have extracted every last drop of money from our dinofuel reserves.

The major companies are never going to go for Biodiesal, unless pushed, because they cannot control it. Any idiot can do it on a small scale, and older less complicated cars are better for it.

Celtic Dragon said:
I want to see how they will calcualte what a 4x4 is if they get their way.
A very good point, there are loads of cars now that are 4x4, (Golf GTI for one), so are they going to be included in this, money grabing, sorry, this seriously considered enviromental measure.

gregorach said:
You mean aside from banishing the killer London Smog,
Was that not caused by the change in fuel, due to the need for more powerful higher temperture furnaces. Not really sure about that.

gregorach said:
cleaning up Europe's rivers to the point where fish can actually live in them again,
Fisherman, not the Green Movement. They did this on Countryfile, the water companies were like you lot can sod off. Come here nice fishermen who actually do stuff. It was brillant.
Plus do not forget the Mink!
Bye Bye, Water Vole!

gregorach said:
reducing the nitrous and sulphuric acid pollution that was killing our forests,
Was this not for medical reasons?

gregorach said:
eliminating CFCs,
When did that happen?

gregorach said:
restricting the use of some extemely dangerous pesticides,
Was this not for medical reasons too i.e it was in paint varnishes and things. By the way good going, we should know the effects of their replacements in 20 or 30 years. Heaven forbid, we actually stop poisioning our food and water supply + Plus lets get the wildlife as well this time, no half measures.

gregorach said:
campaigning for improved fuel efficiency,
Yes, lets use the polluting fuel more efficienctly. Donations from the car/oil campanies arrive swiftly afterwards. Think about it, more and more cars, more and more fuel, so effect in the minus. Way to go, Greens.

This measure actually manages to make the wrong people money and polute the enviroment even more. Rocket science.

gregorach said:
banning commercial whaling,
Now you really are having a laugh!
Last big meeting, whales are still in decline. Plus has not using harpoons, put the shark population in danger, so now we are wiping out two groups.

gregorach said:
changing fishing practices to reduce by-catch...
I did wonder what we had done, to suddely start effectivily wiping Cod, Tuna, and abeltrosses off the planet.

gregorach said:
I could go on. ;)
So could I.

My personel favorite recently was they may have to join forces with the Countryside Alliance to get the Fox Hunting ban over turned, or watch as they are wiped out too.
Got to love it.
We saved them! Bang! What are you doing? Vermin, got to be controlled. Doh!

You actually have to admire us as a species.
We could go down as the first species ever to do it to ourselves.
 
Apr 14, 2006
630
1
Jurassic Coast
"The major companies are never going to go for Biodiesal, unless pushed, because they cannot control it."

Hello Minotaur :) I have to take you to task there- what do you propose the oil companies will sell when the oil reserves run out?
................................................................................................................................

also I think you will find that I have never posted on commercial whaling, you seem to have got a bit confused there and I just want to clear your mistake up.

"Quote:"
Originally Posted by twisted firestarter
banning commercial whaling,

"Now you really are having a laugh!
Last big meeting, whales are still in decline. Plus has not using harpoons, put the shark population in danger, so now we are wiping out two groups."

...............................................................................................................................

I love nature and the great outdoors but also love 4x4's (Land Rovers, VW Syncros etc). I don't think they are mutually exclusive. I probably ride a push bike and walk as much as I drive. Surely the point is to take some personal responsibility, Biodiesel is not going to save the world but it is a stepping stone away from our dependence on fossil fuels. :rolleyes:
 

gregorach

Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
Sep 15, 2005
3,723
28
50
Edinburgh
Minotaur said:
[London Smog]
Was that not caused by the change in fuel, due to the need for more powerful higher temperture furnaces. Not really sure about that.

No. Clean Air Act 1953.

[Cleanup of European rivers]
Fisherman, not the Green Movement. They did this on Countryfile, the water companies were like you lot can sod off. Come here nice fishermen who actually do stuff. It was brillant.
And "fishermen" and "the green movement" are completely orthogonal, right? Errr, no.

Plus do not forget the Mink!
Bye Bye, Water Vole!

Pardon? What has that got to do with cleaning up industrial pollution?

[Acid rain]
Was this not for medical reasons?

No. Not that it would make any difference if it were - it's still an environmental issue.

[Banning CFCs]
When did that happen?

Montreal Protocol, 1987.

[Banning dangerous pesticides]
Was this not for medical reasons too i.e it was in paint varnishes and things. By the way good going, we should know the effects of their replacements in 20 or 30 years. Heaven forbid, we actually stop poisioning our food and water supply + Plus lets get the wildlife as well this time, no half measures.

OK, so because it was motivated by the effect that environmental pollution was having directly on human health, rather than some mythical "pure" environmentalism, it's not part of the environmental movement? The robot people have a saying: "does not compute". I agree that we haven't perhaps been as successful as one might like, but would you really rather go back to massive use of DDT?

[Fuel efficiency]
Yes, lets use the polluting fuel more efficienctly. Donations from the car/oil campanies arrive swiftly afterwards. Think about it, more and more cars, more and more fuel, so effect in the minus. Way to go, Greens.

I'll grant you, Jevon's paradox is a major problem here. At least we're trying.

This measure actually manages to make the wrong people money and polute the enviroment even more. Rocket science.

Only if you assume that transport growth wouldn't have happened otherwise. That is a completely unfounded assumption.

[Commercial whaling]
Now you really are having a laugh!
Last big meeting, whales are still in decline. Plus has not using harpoons, put the shark population in danger, so now we are wiping out two groups.

Some whale species are in decline, some are in recovery. If it weren't for the efforts to restrict commercial whaling, those species would now almost certainly be completely extinct.

[fishing by-catch]
I did wonder what we had done, to suddely start effectivily wiping Cod, Tuna, and abeltrosses off the planet.

Cod and tuna fisheries are collapsing due to overfishing, plain and simple.

The environmental movement is not perfect. We have not achieved as much as we would wish, and some of the things we have achieved have had unintended consequences. But I dread to think what the European environment would look like today without what successes we have had.
 
Apr 14, 2006
630
1
Jurassic Coast
gregorach said:
I'll grant you, Jevon's paradox is a major problem here. At least we're trying.
Nicely put gregorach :)

I had never heard of Jevon's paradox so looked it up. It does seem to apply to the oil reserves but my take on it is that whether we have 200mpg cars on the roads or 2mpg cars the oil will dissapear just as fast. I am interested in the concept of 'peak oil' which is the notion that we are reaching the apex of the worlds oil reserves and from here on it will become scarcer. The oil companies will go back to the smaller reserves which they overlooked before as not being economically viable. I for one would be glad to see diesel/ petrol at £5 per gallon to start with. It would certainly make people reconsider whether their journey was necessary and would make each journey a more memorable experience!

This website gives a good description of peak oil- http://www.wolfatthedoor.org.uk/
 
Celtic Dragon said:
I want to see how they will calcualte what a 4x4 is if they get their way.

will be very intresting to see for me as I drive a car yet its a 4x4 too, I have an Impreza.

If the original post is correct ITS not 4x4s
...if government officials get their way.
The environmental pressure group wants a new, £1,800 punitive tax band, to be paid annually, for all cars which exceed 250g/km - "roughly 25mpg," says Greenpeace's Mark Strutt.

if so its all vehicules Not just picking on 4x4's which is fairer

hopfully done at the MOT reading for the year so a bit of fettleing before and after ;) ;)
so if you want a v8 petrol make sure its Tax exempt :lmao:

Duncan
 

Minotaur

Native
Apr 27, 2005
1,600
232
Birmingham
twisted firestarter said:
"The major companies are never going to go for Biodiesal, unless pushed, because they cannot control it."

Hello Minotaur :) I have to take you to task there- what do you propose the oil companies will sell when the oil reserves run out?

Electrictity or Hydrogen. Look at the direction the car companies are taking. It is not towards Green fuels.

twisted firestarter said:
also I think you will find that I have never posted on commercial whaling, you seem to have got a bit confused there and I just want to clear your mistake up.

Sorry, missed that one in the edit. Fixed now.
 

Minotaur

Native
Apr 27, 2005
1,600
232
Birmingham
gregorach said:
No. Clean Air Act 1953.

Was not sure on that one as I said.

gregorach said:
And "fishermen" and "the green movement" are completely orthogonal, right? Errr, no.

Err, yes. The Green Movement are against fishing, a form of hunting so BAD. Where as the Fishermen, want fish to catch so have actually cleaned the rivers. The water companies knowning this and knowing without them they will not meet their clean water targets, have sided with the Fishermen several times, against the Greens.

gregorach said:
Pardon? What has that got to do with cleaning up industrial pollution?

NOthing, just a river related Green success story. Green movement against animals dying so fur bad. Mink get released and evolution takes over.

gregorach said:
No. Not that it would make any difference if it were - it's still an environmental issue.

No, the thing was no-one seem to care about the Enviromental issues, but the fact that it might actually be killing people seemed to have an effect.

gregorach said:
Montreal Protocol, 1987.

There still in use though?

gregorach said:
OK, so because it was motivated by the effect that environmental pollution was having directly on human health, rather than some mythical "pure" environmentalism, it's not part of the environmental movement? The robot people have a saying: "does not compute". I agree that we haven't perhaps been as successful as one might like, but would you really rather go back to massive use of DDT?

My problem with the Green Movement is it is all show and no result or an anti-result. This is a good example, we have swaped a dangerous poison for a group of chemicals that no-one, I will repeat that, NO-ONE knows what they do.

You can go and get tested and you will have these chemicals running in your system. There is a diet or lifestyle women who want to conceive can undertake, it takes two years to get this crap out of their systems. They do not kill you, they are monstrogenes and DNA effectors in high enough quanties. We do not know what they do in low quanties or mixed togeather.

They are in the water supply, the food we eat, and the air we breathe, but at least we got rid of DDT in the UK. We import a lot of our food from other countries, wonder what they use?

gregorach said:
I'll grant you, Jevon's paradox is a major problem here. At least we're trying.

No effect, or worse effect.

The only fuel that seems to be effected is petrol, the vehicles that must do the most miles in the world use diesel.

All of the car companies efforts are going towards cars that need massive industry or power stations behind them.

The Green Movement wants us to stop using cars, or to drive newer ones.

Jevon's Paradox is irrelavant. We do not need to stop using fossil fuels because they will run out, at this rate that will be the least of our problems. We need to stop using fossil fuels because they have an effect on the enviroment. We need to do something that effects the world, not just the UK. The obvous solition is Bio-Diesel. Effect the most vehicles in the shortest amount of time, we got rid of five star in next to no time.

gregorach said:
Only if you assume that transport growth wouldn't have happened otherwise. That is a completely unfounded assumption.

We have expensive, next to useless public transport. We have next to no means of safe predestrian transport. We still build roads, and railways the old way.

Transport growth was so on the cards.

Go to Holland, as the Green Movement and others keep saying, thats what we are aiming for. I really want to know the drugs they are taking? I've been to Holland, they have an intergrated transport system, with modern trains, and tracks. Cycle paths everywhere, in the middle of nowhere the footpaths are big enough for bikes and people. I actually saw my second recumbent bike there. A recumbent bike on an uninterupted straight can do 40 miles an hour. Do you know what comes first for their transport planners? People or bikes, not cars.

Plus they have a speed limit of 55. Guess the only time on the whole journey we sat in traffic for more than 15 minutes? Yes thats right, when we got back to England. They have two lane Motorways, it makes no sense, to me still, but whatevers goes on in Europe, as far as transport goes seems to work.

I cycle, I like to go places on my bike, I have been knocked down twice on the pavement.

gregorach said:
Some whale species are in decline, some are in recovery. If it weren't for the efforts to restrict commercial whaling, those species would now almost certainly be completely extinct.

I belive the word you were looking for was 'still' to go in front of 'in decline'. That's the word restrict, the Green Movement has not stopped it, they may have slowed it down, and yet again the change of practice has put another species on the block.

gregorach said:
Cod and tuna fisheries are collapsing due to overfishing, plain and simple.

Yep, another massive success, loads of peoples living and communities ruined, and no effect whatsoever on the fish stocks.

gregorach said:
The environmental movement is not perfect. We have not achieved as much as we would wish, and some of the things we have achieved have had unintended consequences. But I dread to think what the European environment would look like today without what successes we have had.

I have to agree, without the Green Movement, we would already be Norway. My problem is could they actually campain for the right things, the logical things, the things that are going to work. Watch the news and see what gets the most Green press. Fox hunting, animal testing, and car use. All major concerns, when we are under 20 foot of snow.
 

Martyn

Bushcrafter through and through
Aug 7, 2003
5,252
33
58
staffordshire
www.britishblades.com
FGYT said:
If the original post is correct ITS not 4x4s


if so its all vehicules Not just picking on 4x4's which is fairer

It isnt fair, my defender puts out 282 g/km which would get me slapped with the £1800 tax bill, but I do less than 4000 miles a year - that's 1.1 tonnes of CO2 a year.

Put that next to a 1.6 eurobox that puts out 200g/km and an owner who does 20,000 miles a year and they are putting out 4 tonnes of CO2 a year. Their personal carbon footprint is 4x mine, yet they get low tax and I get taxed £1800 a year. How is that fair?

The only thing that is fair is to tax the fuel, because it's both CO2 efficiency and total mileage that are the problem. Taxing fuel is the only form of taxation that fairly addresses both issues.
 

Scuba Pete

Forager
Nov 3, 2005
212
0
45
Glasgow
I agree with you Martyn.

If they taxed fuel then you would have a lot of angry motorists. But by picking on the 4x4 market etc they are limiting the number of people they will be upsetting. There will be a lot of talk about how they are evil, and the greatest polluters, but as it has already been pointed out you have to factor in the mileage you do as well. I guess they think that will be easier for the public to swallow.

When I had a car I used to drive a Shogun, it was great and I miss it a lot. My fuel bill was larger then I would have liked but it fitted my needs well. Not that I feel I have to justify it’s use to anyone, but it was great for diving, Camping and for my old IT business where I did a lot of onsite work. When I bought it I knew it would cost more in fuel, but that’s a price you pay.

The only fair way to reduce the number of cars on the road, and the journey’s we make is to tax the fuel. I would like to see the extra money generated go into the public transport system to lower the costs for everyone.

This will be very unpopular but I can’t see any other fair way.
 

Burnt Ash

Nomad
Sep 24, 2003
338
1
East Sussex
There was an interesting artricle by Bryan Appleyard in yesterday's Sunday Times Magazine (February 18, 2007). His thesis, in essence, was that 4x4s amounted to diddly-squat in the grand scheme of global carbon dioxide emissions, climate change, etc. What they are, however, is a jolly good excuse for socialists/greens/sandal-knitters, etc., etc. to hate people who are a bit richer than themselves. I quote: "class hatred, envy and gender are distorting the facts"

Personally, I agree. The inescapable problem is that there are too many humans on the planet. At over 6.5 billion of us, that's more than three times too many according to some whose knowledge of such matters greatly exceeds my own.

The 'sinners' of Richmond and their Range Rovers have SFA to do with it.

Burnt Ash
 

Greg

Full Member
Jul 16, 2006
4,335
259
Pembrokeshire
The taxation of 4x4 owners to help fight global pollution is just another money grabbing idea from some snotty nosed government employee to raise yet more money for those greedy idiots in parliament who couldn't organise a decent p**s up in a brewery!

The pollution caused by Oil refineries and the like in a single week far outways any caused by vehicles. You only have to see the Flare stacks on a night time when, because they can't do it during the day, they open up and release excess pressure from the units which causes a 50 - 100ft dirty orange flame to erupt from the stack which bellows thick black smoke which can't be seen at night!
Now thats what I call pollution!!

But if the government raised their taxes the owner companies, mainly American probably, would pack up and leave, set up in a third world country and carry on. So they get away with it.

So to all you eco warriors out there who like jumping on the bandwagon, but mostly still eat the food produced by our farming communities and enjoy walking, camping or riding your bicycles in the countryside which is managed by decent people who use Landrovers and the like to get about and manage the land that you enjoy so much! Leave the 4x4 drivers alone!

Oh except those rich Suburbanites, as I like to call them who only buy 4x4s as a fashion statement to impress their friends on the school run / shopping run. You can hassle them as much as you want and the government can take as much money as they like off them!!!:D
 

gregorach

Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
Sep 15, 2005
3,723
28
50
Edinburgh
Well, I don't want to get bogged down trying to dispute Minatour's bizarre characterisation of the "Green Movement", even if it does appear to be a large collection of straw men... Just one example, then I'm out of here:

The Green Movement are against fishing, a form of hunting so BAD.

Really? I think you may be confusing the larger "Green Movement" with the Green Party of England and Wales there... I'm in the SGP, and we have no policy against fishing that I'm aware of. I personally have nothing against fishing. The "Green Movement" is a very big tent, and I certainly don't agree with everybody in that tent about everything - none of us do.

Your basic operating assumption seems to be that if anyone has actually achieved anything positive in relation to the environment, then they're by definition not part of what you regard as the "Green Movement". That's a rather closed-minded attitude, in my opinion.

I'm outta this thread.
 

Silverback

Full Member
Sep 29, 2006
978
15
England
Greg said:
Oh except those rich Suburbanites, as I like to call them who only buy 4x4s as a fashion statement to impress their friends on the school run / shopping run. You can hassle them as much as you want and the government can take as much money as they like off them!!!:D
That's a bit strong Greg - some of those speed humps at Tesco's can be really tricky :lmao:
 

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