The U.K. has been a center of climate-policy fundamentalism for a while now. The consequences have included billions of wasted pounds but no material impact on the climate. (Britain accounts for around 1 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.) None of this has been a surprise. Other countries would benefit from Britain’s example by rejecting it.

A key part of the U.K.’s green “transition” (an orderly word for a chaotic process) has been the planned prohibition of the sale of new internal-combustion-engine cars (including, insanely, hybrids) from 2035. The preamble to this ban is a somewhat Soviet-style quota system, which has parallels in the EU, California, New York, and elsewhere (including the U.S. as a whole if the EPA’s new rules survive). Starting from 2024, EVs must account for an increasing percentage of automakers’ new car sales in the U.K., whether or not there is real demand for them.

Earlier on, while Boris Johnson was prime minister, the date of the ban had been advanced to 2030, but in September, Rishi Sunak, the current Tory prime minister, scenting the chance of winning a few votes, moved that date to 2035. This put the U.K. in line with those notorious deniers in the EU, and the usual suspects were outraged. But would this change amount to very much? On September 23, I wrote that it would be “nuts to extend the ban’s deadline to 2035 (to be clear, it’s nuts to have any mandate), and then not extend the phase-in” (the “pathway” of increasingly demanding quotas) that came with it.

Revisiting Sunak’s supposed concession to realism a month or so later, I noted that the government opted for nuts, or something close to it, announcing an almost unchanged pathway that reduced the extension to 2035 to little more than a gesture designed to deceive the electorate. In December, writing about the California quotas, I hazarded a not very difficult guess as to where such regimes would lead:

Essentially, if an auto manufacturer cannot sell enough electric vehicles (EVs), it will have to sell fewer traditional cars in order to meet its quota, something, of course, that will hit its profits and (presumably) create a shortage of the type of cars that consumers actually want to buy. Such is the madness of central planning, and it is a real possibility that this shambles is something that we can expect in the relatively near future, given the failure of consumers to buy EVs at the pace that was expected of them.

And so, on May 7, this news broke (via the Financial Times):

Ford is prepared to restrict the sale of petrol models in the UK in order to hit the country’s stretching EV targets, a move that is likely to push up prices for consumers, its European boss has warned.

Martin Sander also pushed back plans to sell only electric cars in Europe by 2030, saying the old target was now “irrelevant” because sales were “below expectations”.

He told a Financial Times summit that weak sales meant the company’s only option to avoid crippling fines under the UK’s new EV quota rules was to divert sales to other countries. “We can’t push EVs into the market against demand. We’re not going to pay penalties. We are not going to sell EVs at huge losses just to buy compliance. The only alternative is to take our shipments of [engine] vehicles to the UK down and sell these vehicles somewhere else,” he told the FT’s Future of the Car Summit in London.

He added: “I don’t know if consumers in the UK would like seeing [engine vehicle] prices going up.”

Spoiler: They won’t. And higher prices in the market for new traditional cars will spill over into the used-car market. As election-winning strategies go (the Tories can already expect a crushing defeat in the general election later this year), I have seen better. As a gesture of contempt for free markets and consumer choice, it is, however, up there. The U.K. quota for an automaker’s new EV sales in 2024 is 22 percent. Currently sales are running at a rate of 17 percent. For every conventional new car a manufacturer sells in a year in which it fails to meet its EV quota, it will pay a fine of £15,000.

Tory Britain has a Minister for Aviation and Decarbonisation of Transport (of course it does), Anthony Browne. He says (the FT reports) that he is “not worried” at all. Well, he wouldn’t be. I don’t know if he owns any shares in car companies, but he’ll be out of government before the bills for the car bailouts fall due. Oh yes, he “drives a five year-old petrol Toyota RAV4. But he’s thinking of going electric. . . .”

Here’s Browne, writing for Conservative Home in May:

We went from horse-powered carriages to internal combustion engine powered cars. Imagine the range anxiety of early drivers before the network of petrol stations was built out around the country. People had to drive around with spare cans of fuel just in case.

We don’t have to “imagine” anything, Mr. Browne. At the beginning of the 20th century, internal-combustion-engine cars had to compete against the horse, steam-powered cars, and EVs. Steam proved too inconvenient (keeping the boiler “fed” was a problem, among other issues) and was overtaken by rapid improvements in the internal-combustion engine. Free-market competition did what it is supposed to do, a phenomenon that the EV enforcers seem unwilling to appreciate as whole-heartedly as they should. No one banned the horse.

For some reason, Browne does not mention that range anxiety was a major reason why the EVs of the early 1900s flopped. Nor does he seem to understand that those portable cans of energy-dense gasoline were a feature, not a bug, an answer to range anxiety that early EVs could not match. And as demand for internal-combustion cars increased, so a network of “petrol” (gas) stations grew alongside it, an organic creation of the market very different from the belated effort (Tesla excepted) being made to build charging stations, something which may yet prove a rather greater infrastructural challenge than Browne appears to realize.

He’s “not worried at all though.” The FT reports that he believes that cheaper cars from established manufacturers (I wonder when/if they will make money out of them) and from new Chinese brands will help “drive” (I’m not clear whether that is the FT’s word or Browne’s) customers into EVs.

The Chinese to the rescue. What could go wrong?