Norway’s Finance Minister said last weekend that the Nordic nation is considering banning the sale of gasoline-powered cars entirely by 2015 in an effort to increase sales of greener, electric, hybrid or hydrogen-powered models. The proposal would still allow for the sale of gasoline-electric hybrids, however, and it wouldn’t take current gas-powered cars off of the road.
Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen, a member of Norway’s Socialist Left Party, explained the proposal at an electric and biofuel exhibition in Oslo, where she raced a Mitsubishi electric car on a course against other politicians. Halvorsen might have finished towards the bottom of the pack each run, but that didn’t deter her from defending the gas-free proposal.
“This is much more realistic than people think when they first hear about this proposal,” Halvorsen told Reuters. “The financial crisis also means that a lot of those car producers that now have big problems … know that they have to develop their technology because we also have to solve the climate crisis when this financial crisis is over.”
Norway, however, is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter, which naturally raised some questions about the local economy.
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