Norway’s Finance Minister said last weekend that the Nordic nation is considering banning the sale of cars powered solely by gasoline 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 gas-electric hybrids, and it wouldn’t take current gas-powered cars off of the road.
Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen 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.
“We know that the world will be dependent on oil and gas for many decades ahead but we have to introduce new technologies and this is a proposal to support that,” she said.
Not surprisingly, there is limited support in the government for the Finance Minister’s proposal; the country’s Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, has said he opposes the plan.
