Ethiopia becomes first country to ban internal combustion engines: Only EVs allowed

Good for them

Ah, so this is basically mandating that your unicorn needs to be painted pink…

I suspected car ownership would be low, but I didn’t know it was THAT bad though.

I would wager significant money that China has a big hand in this.

The Belt and Road initiative has been letting them get their hooks into Africa quite well and Ethiopia is still not a rich country, if you are reasonably well off and can afford a vehicle chances are its not going to be a Polestar or a Tesla. BYD, LDV and GWM are going to become the default brands.

That's even better than all cars being EVs.

Rare W

@sir_pronoun GERD (the dam) is already partly operating but yes contested.

The plan seems to be primarily aimed at slowing fuel imports. Worth noting their leader Abiy has created a coalition of almost all the political parties so it's now almost a de-facto one party state (except places he has attacked like Tigray, which is now in famine).

Here is a better article on it

Personally I think there's going to be problems.

I don’t live there anymore but my father owns a few small businesses that rely heavily on road transport. This decision hasn’t come into effect yet but is due to be implemented at the end of march. As a result there has been a huge influx of poor quality used cars on the roads and put into storage waiting to be sold at a markup. Most people here won’t be able to afford electric cars so it seems like a bad decision by a government trying to impress its neighbours on the global stage but it won’t matter because they are very popular with the younger voters. The most interesting part though is this was all made up. I live in Mexico and couldn’t point to Ethiopia on a map

Do they have to tackle every problem at the same time?

i heard chinese are dumping their ev's. not that ethiopia is that big of a consumer market.

Yes, and will they import tricycles or motorcycles instead of cars?

They can be operated with a fuel cell, in which case it doesn't count as ICE.

Money. It says so in the article. They can't afford to import fossils anymore but they have enough (or will have enough) domestically produced electricity.

Meanwhile the rest of the world is keeping the prices on fossil fuels low through inefficient subsidies worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Because a lot of people are „experts“ in how a country should be run. Like we‘re all master soccer trainers when the worldcup starts.

The fact that a country might lose export or gdp numbers due to its drastic clean air measures is like fingers on a chalk board for these people.

The fact that these numbers are meaningless just shows we‘re all brainwashed to be nice little worker bees and care for our masters wealth more than our own air.

Its the same when a person with 30k yearly income says taxing the rich is bad.

Because it's idiocy and it's going to create great hardship for already impoverished people.

Read up on Sri Lanka's big move to being exclusively organic produce. They couldn't afford fertiliser imports so banned all fertiliser and pesticides. It was an unmitigated disaster.

The same is happening here. Their economy is a train wreck, no one will sell them fuel because they don't have any US currency and their own currency could be worthless tomorrow.

This law just makes corrupt border official shenanigans more lucrative. They'll repeal it in 6 months or so when there are riots.

Nah, let's just continue heating up the planet and make it free from livable areas 🙄